Knut Hidle

Market, commodity, resource, and strength: Logics of Norwegian rurality

Rurality as a distinct category and rural identity grew out of a widespread mobilization of rural issues in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the idea that Norway can be split into two categories in a meaningful way, i.e. rural and not rural, is no longer hegemonic. Today, researchers and politicians conceptualize rural issues such that the rural as a category seems to dissolve. Through programme notes published by the Research Council of Norway since the early 1990s, we have tracked some of these new ways of conceptualizing the rural. Most evident in the underlying structure of reasoning is the logic of market, which is said to spring up in every Western economy in the neoliberal era. From this, rurality is understood in the context of globalization – again being linked to cultural complexity and innovation. Further, in this global context, rurality is being subordinated to the category region. The logic of market has also rendered possible a turn in the rural category from having a value of its own to being a commodity. All these changes have ultimately made it possible to use the structural metaphor of resource on rurality.

Performing Home in Mobility: Second Homes in Norway

Abstract This paper aims at studying how the increase in the number of second homes in Norway can be interpreted as an expression of changes in cultural attitudes towards home. We have set out to study two conceptual pairings in more detail: home and mobility, and centre (urbanity) and periphery (rurality). The former pairing is significant because the concept of home now has a subordinated role in the interpretation of post-modern society, while mobility is regarded commonly as the dominating mechanism. With a peripatetic lifestyle, a ‘home’ may comprise various locations, related to both place and mobility. Based on interviews in two major second-home areas, we assert that mobility between homes represents a reorganization of spatiality that relates to how different practices are linked to different home locations, as well as forging stronger links between centre and periphery.

Urban—Rural Flows and the Meaning of Borders Functional and Symbolic Integration in Norwegian City-Regions

This article focuses on political and everyday interplay and integration between city and hinterland, investigating borders and boundaries in such interplay. Five Norwegian city-regions served as the empirical basis for analysing two empirical fields. In the first field — everyday mobility and flow — institutionalized interactions between the cities and their hinterlands were analysed as well as objectives and meaning as motivations in everyday mobility in the city-region between city and hinterland. In the second field — urban-regional economic development policy — the questions addressed related to the degree to which governance networks are developed as a tool in local economic development policy, the geographical span such networks have, and the degree to which actors are motivated by the idea of creating a city-region where the importance of borders is decreasing. The issues were discussed in a theoretical frame related to urban and boundary theory.The results demonstrated the multitude of meanings with regard to borders and boundaries, underscoring how fundamentally different cognitive approaches related to borders and flows are constituent in the two empirical fields as well as how borders and boundaries are used to separate and connect in fulfilling purposeful ends.

Who Can Govern? Comparing Network Governance Leadership in Two Norwegian City Regions

What social and structural mechanisms determine where hands-on leadership of city-region governance networks is anchored? In this article, we discuss the origin of city-region governance leadership in two Norwegian city regions. Based on empirical analysis, we argue that variations in terms of leadership practices cannot be fully explained in terms of levels of trust, social capital and institutional set-up. Issues related to how power is institutionalized needs to be explored and explained in order to improve our understanding of processes associated with the construction of leadership of governance networks. We also recognize that where this type of leadership is anchored can have important implications for both regional economic development as well as defining the qualities of local democracy.

Policy Strategies for New Regionalism: Different Spatial Logics for Cultural and Business Policies in Norwegian City Regions

This article asks about differences and similarities in the way cultural policy and business policy deal with regions in Norwegian city regions. The article discusses New Regionalism as a particular spatial practice, and stresses the difference between regionalism as a bottom-up process driven by local stakeholders and regionalization as a top-down process driven by state bodies. The role and significance of New Regionalism in city-regional policy-making is investigated. Empirical findings shows that cultural policy at the city-regional level is still under strong influence from a top-down state regionalization, while business policy at the city-regional level is, to a large extent, an example of bottom-up regionalism. The spatial logic of these two policy-fields differs from each other. Business policy rests on an interpretation of region/place as a container of established networks, relations and interactions that should be coordinated in order to strengthen the region in its competition with other regions. Cultural policy rests on another interpretation that is not territorial in the same degree, but rather on a logic that place/region is created as relations between persons, groups and institutions within a geographical scope that is not predefined and fixed with borders and boundaries.

A CRISIS OF DEFINITION: CULTURE VERSUS INDUSTRY IN ODDA, NORWAY

Abstract This article addresses the influence of dominant and traditional ways of grasping the reality in social and economic processes of change. Our point of departure is how the perception of crisis in Odda, a small industrial community in Norway, influences the course of the process of change. The analysis focuses on a heated debate over the exploitation of a large site in the centre of Odda, left after the closure of the key factory. Rather than the economic and social consequences of the closure, the main challenge that arose from the crisis was related to the emergence of ambiguity in the local conceptual framework. Coming to terms with the situation stimulated various attempts to rearticulate the discourse of local development, with the result that industrial and culture‐based perspectives on development came into conflict. The economic crisis became a crisis of definition. In Odda, the industrial discourse finally domesticated the competing cultural discourse, ending years of conflict and inaction. In its explicit focus on the importance of local struggles and the way discourse structures such processes this story about recent developments in Odda complements literature on post‐industrial development.