The relationship with place has been recognized as a significant dimension of rural youth leisure, both through the discursive constructions of place, but also as affective and embodied dimensions. This study captures these processes by applying the concept of place-making as a set of recurrent discursive processes, analyzing how girls in Northern Sweden engage in place-making alongside, beyond, and in contrast to dominant discourses on leisure, rurality and wellbeing. The study draws on data from photo-elicited focus groups with girls from two sports organizations. The discursive psychology analysis resulted in three interpretative repertoires. The first repertoire describes the sharp contrast between discourses of the ‘rural dull’ and how stressful the participants constructed their own places of leisure. The second illustrates the gendered discourses around what is considered to be productive and respectable leisure. The third shows how the participants are made responsible for the survival of their leisure. Through place-making, the participants shape places of leisure, affecting both themselves and their rural community. They engage in, conform to, and challenge place-making within discourses of responsibility and precariousness, creating space for their own initiatives, which are simultaneously shaped by the material conditions under which these practices take place.

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Smart cities build on the idea of collecting data about the city in order for city administration to be operated more efficiently. Within a research project gathering an interdisciplinary team of researchers ? engineers, designers, gender scholars and human geographers ? we have been working together using participatory design approaches to explore how paying attention to the diversity of human needs may contribute to making urban spaces comfortable and safe for more people. The project team has deployed sensors collecting data on air quality, sound and mobility in a smart city testbed in Norrköping, Sweden. While these sensors are meant to capture an accurate ?map? of the street and what is going on along it, our interdisciplinary conversations around the sensors have revealed the heterogeneity both of smart city planning and spatial formulations of the city. The discussions have given rise to questions regarding the work that goes into constructing the sensor box itself, as well as the work of deploying it, and how these influence the ?map? that the sensors produce. In this paper, we draw on Lefebvre to explore how the sensors themselves produce smart spaces. We analyze how the box depends on perceived space to function (e.g. requiring electricity), and simultaneously it produces conceptualizations of space that are influenced by the materiality of the box itself (e.g. sensors being affected by heat and noise). Further, we explore how the (in)visibility of sensor technology influences lived space.

In 2015 protests started in response to planned cutbacks at the local hospital in the town of Sollefteå. The cutbacks affected mainly emergency and delivery care and the protests later developed into an occupation of the hospital entrance. Over the course of the protests, the mobilisation was framed in the light of emblematic historical struggles that had played out in the area. To mobilise people today, the protests drew on this ‘place trajectory’ of struggles that shaped the Swedish welfare state. This was a rather successful strategy, but connecting today’s struggles with those in the past brought to light some of the old conflict lines of the past, while at the same time it hid some of the issues in the current struggle, e.g. women’s work and working conditions in the affected hospital. Drawing on place trajectories in political contention thus seems to be an ambivalent strategy that can mobilise people but risks glossing over current issues in favour of historical connections.

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Föreställningarna om landsbygdens roll i samhället är många och brokiga. Å ena sidan betraktas landsbygden som avskild och perifer, å andra sidan som en plats där fötterna står stadigt i myllan och där anknytning kan byggas mellan människan och platsen hon bor på. Å ena sidan beskylls landsbygden för att parasitera på de tillväxtgenererande storstäderna, för att vara "bidragsberoende" och "tillväxthämmad", eller för att skapa grogrund för reaktionära rörelser i motsats till den framåtsträvande och progressiva staden. Å andra sidan beskrivs landsbygden som en tillflyktsort för stressade storstadsmänniskor, som med sina annorlunda levnadsvanor vittnar om en ojämn ekonomisk-geografisk utveckling. Gemensamt för dessa föreställningar är att landsbygden får tjäna som stadens antites. Har landsbygden ett existensberättigande utanför denna binära relation? Kan landsbygden rymma något mer än sådana egenskaper som står i motsatsförhållande till dem som framhävs hos staden? Kan den rymma alla de ovanstående egenskaperna samtidigt? Är den samtidigt reaktionär, progressiv, fattig, rik, perifer, central, bidragsberoende, tillväxtgenererande, traditionell och modern?

The challenge of how cities can be designed and developed in an inclusive and sustainable direction is monumental. Smart city technologies currently offer the most promising solution for long-term sustainability, but the impact of such solutions will be significantly reduced without long-term, widespread adoption by citizens.

Privatization of health services has creeped in even those systems which are generally perceived as accessible to all. The health system in Sweden, for example, has seen numerous attempts — with various degrees of success — to introduce private elements. In addition to a well documented case of public-private partnership in building the new Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm, there have been various instances of local governments’ intentions to shut down smaller hospitals which were deemed non-essential. On more than one occasion, these attempts have been met by resistance from the community, and by alternatives thought of by the community to ensure that health care delivery is not impeded by public budget cuts. On some occasions, people’s initiatives were not successful in preserving public delivery of health care, but they managed to keep the services going through health cooperatives. Although these should not be perceived as an alternative to universal public health systems, health cooperatives represent a more democratic and participative model of health care delivery than the one offered by large profit-driven companies. 

The challenge of how cities can be designed and developed in an inclusive and sustainable direction is monumental. Smart city technologies currently offer the most promising solution for long-term sustainability. However, smart city projects have been criticised for ignoring diverse needs of the local population and increasing social divides. A sustainable urban environment depends as much on creating an inclusive space that is safe, accessible and comfortable for a diverse group of citizens as it does on deploying "smart" technologies for energy efficiency or environmental protection. This is because citizens will be more likely to adopt technologies promoting sustainability if they are well-aligned with their lived needs and experiences. In this paper, we present the rationale behind an ongoing interdisciplinary research project that aims to address exactly the problem outlined above by using a participatory design approach. Focusing on a smart city test site in Sweden where sensors are currently being deployed to collect data on noise, particles, vehicle numbers and types (amongst other), the goal is to bring local residents and government representatives into dialogue with technical developers by adopting a "meet-in-the-middle" approach. This paper comprises a brief presentation of early findings and a reflection on this approach.