Mobility and Place

Enacting Northern European Peripheries

Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt, Brynhild Granås

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138270114
• eBook ISBN: 9781317095071
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The Northern peripheries of Europe, which are covered by this book, are associated with remoteness, the frontier, isolated communities, colonialism and resource extraction. Recently, huge projects in petroleum and hydropower have been located there, and the region has become better known as an attractive tourist destination. Although these spaces are perceived as being marginal, they are inhabited and linked into globalization and international agendas. This book examines how people live in such remote spaces in an emerging global world of connectivity, interdependency, mobility and non-linear dynamics. The various case studies examine a wide range of experiences, ranging from tourists and local settlers to those who migrate for labour in old or new industries, or to pursue the hybrid urban/rural life of the periphery. In this book, mobility and place come together. The analyses demonstrate how mobility and place mutually constitute each other and how specific relationships between the two aspects are crucial in the making of societies. The authors study attempts to reinvent places, together with connections and the opening of 'new scapes' in order to sustain businesses, municipalities and people's livelihood.

Chapter 1
Places and Mobilities Beyond the Periphery

Jørgen Ole Bærenholdt and Brynhild Granås

Introduction

Mobility and place become together. While many debates tend to favour one more than the other, this book consistently investigates the intersections of mobility and place. The thematic focus is a spin-off of contemporary debates in the social sciences, explored here through research within the Northern European periphery. These approaches elucidate social transformations on the margin whilst also contributing to international academic discourses, which are otherwise more oriented towards so-called global centres. The analyses presented tell of continuous mobility engagements as part of place production, involving the remaking of places and economies, and new political and cultural projects of definition.

Images of the Northern European peripheries are varied. They may be associated with remoteness, frontier and isolation, for example, with exotic natural scenery and attractive tourist places, or with colonialism and resource extraction, for example, through traditional fishery or industrial mega-projects. This book supersedes any long-distance and from-above characterizations of this part of Northern Europe that may exist. The areas are investigated as people’s lived spaces and tell of how their practices and relations enmesh places of the peripheries into a ‘global’ world through interdependency, connectivity and mobility.

The people concerned are multifarious, ranging from ethnic majority inhabitants, indigenous people and minorities to migrants and tourists. Some may migrate or commute for labour in old or new industries, whilst others may pursue the hybrid urban/rural lifestyle opportunities of the periphery. Our contributions demonstrate how new social scapes are enacted across distinctions such as periphery-centre, local-global, and so on. Descriptions from these positions illustrate the fact that society is ‘performed through everyone’s effort to define it’ (Latour 1986, 275). In addition, in the cases explored in this book, societies are performed over distances and at a distance, through the social interaction, networks and fields that people enact; local communities are not a priori social fields (Saugestad 1996). Societies are thus made, transformed and emerge with everyday interpersonal relations, and cannot be approached as closed, holistic systems (Barth 1992). The making and remaking of periphery places involves crucial transports, connections and mobilities towards physically distant people and places.

This book demonstrates how specific relationships between mobility and place are crucial in the making of societies. The ways in which people in Northern European peripheries have been coping with distance is a powerful case of how societies are produced (Bærenholdt 2007). An integrated pursuit for this book is to analyse in greater detail how transport, communications, migration, transnationalism, tourism and travel engender social obligations and figurations (Hannam et al. 2006). As stated above, our approach to places does not represent a counterpart to this, since place is not the static and fixed contrast to mobility. Also, places are not discrete and powerless enactments: rather they are involved in the wider ‘power geometries’ of the processes of globalization. The social production of places therefore entails highly contested political and economic actions involved with the fundamental question of who takes responsibility for whom (Massey 2004).

Places may be enacted through their roles as arenas where people are likely to meet, or do so contingently (Bourdieu 1996). Thus, even though the establishment of a place can be planned for, places are generated through non-predictable meetings between people. These meetings may be corporeal or virtual, if not also imaginative. The present reader investigates how a wide range of practices and encounters are often also framed by images, brands and the politics of the North. These are attempts to enact places and connections, in order to sustain businesses and people’s livelihoods. We aim to show how the more spontaneous encounters and the more strategic actions intersect, since they feed and frame each other.

Hence, people are ‘thrown together’ in particular places (Massey 2005), whilst also being involved in diverse practices of mobility (Cresswell 2006). Our approach to the spatial practices of place and mobility, in line with Massey (2005), thus focuses on interactions, multiplicity and constant processes of construction and negotiation. Places and mobilities are inherently political, but there are no universal categories of the spatial organization of societies. They are formed in particular ways through the spontaneous and political practices of people, but these specificities do not produce insular local contexts. On the contrary: the idea of local context is contested with the connectivities involved in people’s practices. We are thus in a state beyond the dichotomy of the good local, so-called ‘internal’, control versus the bad non-local, ‘external’ control. Connections and encounters crucial to people’s lives are often much more complex and dynamic than envisaged in such a simple dichotomy. Contexts are thus not predetermined at any scalar level, but only emerge with the practices of making and becoming places and mobilities. In the next section we explain an approach to understanding such practices.

Enactment: Invention and Emergence

Enactment combines spontaneous and political practices, and claims a crucial play across the two: On the one hand, political projects of place enactment can hardly materialize without referring to practices of connection and encounter that have already emerged. On the other hand, the emergence of connections and encounters may well have been conditioned by specific politics of place making (Nyseth and Granås 2007). Enactment also includes the term of emergence, but not solely with the connotations of spontaneous evolution (Jóhannesson 2007). The place enactment approach combines invention and emergence, and thus bypasses dichotomies between instrumental mastering and mere tactical adaptation. In parallel with the concept of coping practices (Bærenholdt 2007), it combines strategies that ‘can be isolated from an “environment”’ with a tactic that ‘belongs to the other’ (de Certeau 1984, xix).

Places are not construed out of nowhere but involve materialities, politics and imaginations, comprising people’s engagement with their physical-material environment. Practices of place enactment thus directly involve nature, politics of nature and imaginations of nature (see Chapters 16, 17, 18 and 19 by Lehtinen, Benediktsson, Kraft and Guneriussen, respectively), as well as communication technologies (see Chapters 8 and 9 by Larsen and Urry and by Brekke). This book is more concerned with the critical and cultural engagements involved and less with elements of strategic place marketing (Kearns and Philo 1993; Ek and Hultman 2007). Imaginations and myths of places are used to celebrate and enchant the margins (Shields 1991). However, these practices are often ambivalent, since economic strategies, social communities and cultural meanings can easily prove a misfit for one another. Politics of place enactment are therefore likely to become messy, but this messiness can also nourish the creativity, commitment and openness crucial to change with regard to new livelihoods in Northern European peripheries (see Chapter 13 by Jóhannesson and Bærenholdt).

One way of approaching the messiness of politics of place enactment is through the double notions of politics of propinquity and politics of connectivity proposed by Ash Amin (2004). Firstly, politics of propinquity focus on the energy of practices that may follow from people being somehow contingently thrown together within a place (see Massey 2005). Such politics are ‘shaped by the issues thrown up by living with diversity and sharing a common territorial space’ (Amin 2004, 39); it is a coping practice ‘against a presumed hierarchy of worth or order’ (Amin 2004, 40). Thus, it involves enactment through the bridging and synergy among people who happen to meet and engage in a place. Secondly, enactment of place is also about a politics of relational connectivity (Amin 2004, 40) that is ‘open to both local and distant actors...’ (Amin 2004, 41). These are emergent politics to perform and manipulate distances (Young 2006), where enactment practises re-order relations between distance and proximity. It is not only a spatial politics but also definitively temporal, since shaping the world involves making some things present and maintaining others absent, in both time and space.

A number of instances in this book show how time and space are deeply intertwined in the making and performance of place. Simply put, since place involves presence it is both spatial and temporal (see also Bærenholdt et al. 2004, Chapter 3). This is the case, for example, with places that are more or less attached to specific resources (see Chapters 17, 16 and 12 by Benediktsson, Lehtinen and Viken, respectively): such places may come and go, along with place-specific resources. However, resources that are absent ‘here and now’ can also, in ambivalent ways, influence present transformations; historical continuity may frame enactment processes (see Chapter 6 by Kristiansen and Hovgaard), just as ruptures can set the course for new activities (see Chapter 15 by Granås and Nyseth). Place enactment may be about preparing for reflection through networks and creating new narratives through actions and events with global or universal appeal (see Chapter 18 by Kraft) or projects that re-enact past heroes and pathways (see Chapter 13 by Jóhannesson and Bærenholdt). Enactment policies thus play with a remixing of absence and presence, connectivity and propinquity, and the like.

Deconstructing Peripherality

This book is about the enacting of Northern European peripheries, though we are in no way trying to generalize our findings or claim validity for certain areas, such as the Nordic countries or the peripheries of the Nordic countries – not forgetting Russian parts of the Northern European periphery. More than geographical areas, it is the use of the category ‘periphery’ that needs to be considered here.

In the more economics-based Chapter 14 by Power and Jansson, Nordic countries are themselves considered to be peripheral, since the commodity chains under study envision a centre-periphery structure between consumers and producers. They show how manufacturing firms, which can be central job providers in the periphery, have a more contingent relation with their specific location than with their temporal marketplaces. Firms may move, but international trade fairs are indispensable and have become nodes in global networks.

While the asymmetries embedded in such relations may be valid for some business relations, this book contributes primarily with more critical considerations of the notion of the periphery and the centre-periphery dichotomy. In Chapter 5, Gry Paulgaard argues in favour of transcending dichotomies such as centre-periphery, especially when associated with other binaries such as future-past. Paulgaard shows how young people, when negotiating their identifications, still have to cope with such binaries and even hierarchical orders, despite the tendency of academics to view centre-periphery models as ‘outdated’. A discursive backcloth for young people’s negotiations is Norwegian intellectuals’ more or less romantic identity politics, which have praised small towns and villages, as well as associating the periphery with nationalistic projects (see Bærenholdt 2007). Eager to be modern, youngsters produce hierarchical orders among localities within the periphery as measures of ‘degree of modernity’. Such centre-periphery narratives are laden with power, as they have also become part of how places are practised (see Chapter 2 by Simonsen). However, there are also approaches to place – focusing on a more direct sensing of and being along places – that do not address or value the meaning of such narratives and identity politics (such as Chapter 3 by Mazullo and Ingold).

The centre-periphery dichotomy needs to be deconstructed. Hence it is a question of the extent to which social scientists should use the kind of relational centre-periphery model applied in economic geography (see Chapter 14 by Power and Jansson). However, when youngsters in the far North engage in their world with concepts not far removed from those of economic geography, there are obvious limits to the project of deconstructing peripherality. Meanwhile, several chapters in this book suggest a re-centring of our awareness of the ‘radius’ or ‘concentric side of human community building’ (see Chapters 5 and 16 by Paulgaard and Lehtinen, respectively), by focusing on how people live and make their lives meaningful, in spite of attempts to displace them. Ironically, such endeavours as forms of resistance to outside dominance may re-affirm the dichotomies questioned.

When peripheries tend to re-emerge, this is not only because certain projects of re-centring produce new ‘internal’ peripheries of those not included (see Chapter 6 by Kristiansen and Hovgaard). It is also because the periphery is being endlessly reproduced as a part of personal or political identity projects. This may occur in the form of individual searches for meaning and authenticity in life (see Chapter 4 by Birkeland). It may also occur as part of a broader pattern of travelling, drawing on the image of the North or even nordicity/nordism; some are in search of a frontier, where acknowledgement may depend on one’s capabilities in outdoor life (see Chapter 12 by Viken) and an understanding of the ‘rules of the North to survive in the backwoods’, as a way of ‘measuring one’s “nordicity”’ (see Chapter 16 by Lehtinen).

The North is associated with an image of the suppressed in need of new stories, beyond primitivism, smallness, periphery, nature and tradition (see Chapter 18 by Kraft). Paradoxically, such projects – like the Tromsø campaign to host the Winter Olympics – tend to re-invest the North with wilderness and the ‘magic’ of the savage (see Chapter 19 by Guneriussen). However, there are definitely distinctions in landscape views: Icelanders are proud of ‘their’ nature (see Chapter 17 by Benediktsson), while Polish labour migrants may perceive the landscapes of Iceland as obstacles and as less authentic than those where they came from (see Chapter 10 by Skaptadóttir and Wojtynska). The work-centred approach to places in Iceland that is displayed by labour migrants differs from the outdoors-centred, playful engagement with nature among the temporary inhabitants of Svalbard (see Chapter 12 by Viken).

Ari Lehtinen shows how place-making and community-building in a trans-border area combine memories of relational displacement and belongingness in ‘concentric initiatives of imaginary relocation’. He suggests a critical place enactment approach to forest conservation in the Greenbelt that involves shared memories as well as identity politics (thus in line with suggestions made in Chapters 2 and 5 by Simonsen and Paulgaard, respectively). This approach contrasts the highlighting of centre-periphery within place marketing and economic geography with the shared (concentric) memories of people living there. Karl Benediktsson similarly suggests approaching conservation as a politics of nature, involving stories of construction workers, imaginations of protest and mobile protectors to the mega-project of hydropower construction in Iceland. Where mountains are removed and valleys are flooded, academics’ ‘constructivist play’ with nature needs to engage with how people feel about such irreversible changes. ‘Even if a view of place as a relational enactment is adopted, place must still be recognized as an enormously important locus of affect and emotion’ (Chapter ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Places and Mobilities Beyond the Periphery
• Part 1 Placing Mobility
• Part 2 Connections and Encounters
• Part 3 Mobilizing Place
• Index