Let's Do Away with Urban : Autoethnographic Adventures in Stockholms län

Sammanfattning: The spatial categorisations of urban and rural are still used in academia, lay terminology and policy formation in spite of a postmodern obsession with the deconstruction of binaries. Hitherto, the urban rural dichotomy has been exposed to little scrutiny, and the critiques that have been made come from the epistemological standpoint of total urbanisation which assumes the rural will be effaced by a perennial urban sprawl. The rural urban dichotomy is a derivative of the larger ideological dualism of nature and society and it has long been postulated, particularly from the standpoint of political ecology, that in the Anthropocene, nature does not exist beyond human influence. This would, in theory, support the theory that rural space is becoming effaced. Previous studies have, however, demonstrated that this subjugation of the rural to the urban works to stigmatise rural populations and engender disenfranchisement that has led to a resurgence in far-right nationalism across much of Europe. This subjugation has been enforced through  this very urban norm in which both technocrats and academics favour the urban as a field for policy formation and research. When attempting to define the urban and the rural, it was found that the terms (a) are confused and confusing, evading any useful definition; (b) perpetuate a false neutrality that assumes a linear progression from rural to urban and (c) fail to recognise the complexities of space which resists binary distinctions. As such, I used Lefebvre’s spatial trifecta which suggests space is produced by three complimentary and contradictory processes: of perceived space (the material space of what we can actually see and touch, altered by seemingly banal everyday practices), conceived space (the (re)representations of space that are circulated by planners and technocrats) and lived space (the affectual space of emotion, memory and meanings) in order to think through the problems of the binary.  As such, this thesis aimed to explore whether the urban and the rural still function as legitimate spatial categories and, in doing so, used an emplaced, embodied and mobile exploration of five case studies within Stockholms län in order to explore the phenomena. This was appropriate as it mirrored the affectual potential believed to be induced through rural and natural landscapes. Indeed, by developing a methodology that can better account for lived space, we can attempt to dislodge perceived and conceived spaces as the more easily accessible conceptual framework for thinking through space. The findings showed that there were many different species of urban and rural spaces, many spaces that were both urban and rural and many that were neither. Indeed, an acquiescence of purportedly rural and urban features within purportedly urban spaces, and vice versa, was the most telling result in terms of disrupting the idea that the urban and rural are stable but antipodal spatial categories. I also found the rural to be a coterminous process that produces space with and against urban landscapes, and thus should not be subjugated.