Despite a long history of urbanisation in Sweden, recent migration research notes a renewed interest in counterurbanisation as well as a higher propensity for families to become counterurban movers. While many of the motives described in counterurbanisation research tend to align with push/pull arguments, the migration decision process is likely to be more complex as it relies on individuals' spatial perceptions and evaluations combined with individual opportunities and constraints for mobility. In migration, everyday practices become disrupted, as the spatial anchoring of certain amenities means that they cannot easily be brought to the new location. This paper focuses on the migration experiences of young counterurbanising families, analysing qualitatively how different amenities are valued and how the trade-off is experienced and negotiated between members of the family unit. Presenting everyday family life from the perspective of assemblages, we seek to grasp at the complexity of the material, social and emotive context of individual and family lifeworlds. Assemblage thinking allows for considering how different elements in everyday life are valued; which are indispensable and which are possible to replace. The logic of assemblages thus opens up for thinking about how everyday life can be disassembled and reassembled through migration, and how family members negotiate this (de/re)construction of everyday life. 

The opening quote (see p. 1) from Edward Relph’s classic text Place and Place-lessness (1976), lays bare the spirit that suffuses the chapters in this book. Our aim was not to seek precise or well-worked-out models to capture the tourism-place-design trialectic. Nor do we conceive of the trialectic as an abstract system, with clear roles and definite relations governing this trialectic. Rather we have emphasised the lived-world of design, one that is attuned to the quotidian and exceptional experiences. Our approach has been not to come up with all-encompassing theories and concepts of tourism and place design, but rather to offer a glimpse into the rich landscape of tourism, place, and design. We hope that we have succeeded in our collective endeavour to provide new ways of looking at the interplays of tourism, place and design, as well as in offering perspectives and examples that are context responsive. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Fredrik Hoppstadius, Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Ulrika Åkerlund; individual chapters, the contributors.

The introduction frames the anthology through the concept of a tourism-place-design trialectic. Tourism, place and design are understood as deeply interconnected and co-creating, shaping how people move, connect and make sense of the world, as well as how places are planned, built and experienced. In the introduction the editors argue that place design theories and practices are never neutral but express assumptions about what is possible and desirable, while simultaneously embellishing, enhancing, erasing or silencing particular relations, narratives and futures. The anthology is positioned as a collective attempt to engage the tourism-place-design trialectic from the disciplinary perspectives of human geography, tourism studies and media studies. Across the anthology, the chapters examine how this trialectic is produced, stabilised and contested in practice, showing how places are assembled through processes that weave together landscapes, communities, media, technologies and both animate and inanimate actors. Design is understood both as building and as constructing material and social realities, and as a critical practice for interrogating existing arrangements. Considered in this way, design opens up new ways of rethinking tourism-place-design and imagining alternative spatial and temporal futures. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Fredrik Hoppstadius, Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Ulrika Åkerlund; individual chapters, the contributors.

This chapter introduces more-than-tourism landscapes as an analytical perspective for examining how tourism places emerge through multispecies encounters, relational design, and material negotiations amid the Anthropocene. We combine tourism landscape theory and more-than-human thinking to analyse how protected areas emerge as assemblages of humans, animals, technologies, and ecological forces. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of assemblage, becoming, and rhizomatic process, design is approached as an ongoing and situated practice rather than a fixed outcome. Using a cartographic method, we map movement, transformation, and the epistemological grounding of design. Empirically, we examine two protected areas: the Lake Vänern Archipelago Biosphere Reserve in Sweden and the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve in Singapore. The sites illustrate situated forms of more-than-human design. Methods include document analysis, participant observation, field diaries, and participant photography within tourism settings. Through these cases, we show how dominant tourism and design practices marginalise non-human life, and we argue that reimagining such landscapes as multispecies assemblages can open pathways towards coexistence, ecological accountability, and sustainable futures. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Fredrik Hoppstadius, Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Ulrika Åkerlund; individual chapters, the contributors.

This book explores the tourism place design trialectic. It shows how destinations are assembled and gain meaning via social, material and ecological processes. Drawing on human geography, tourism and media studies, the book combines theoretical perspectives such as the second gaze, participatory design, more-than-human design and digital mediation, with empirical case studies ranging from rural landscapes to culinary tourism, overtourism and VR environments and AI-driven tourism experience design. In sum, this anthology offers analytical tools and novel theoretical frameworks that throw light on the contested material and digital terrain of tourism place design. The book is intended for students, researchers, planners, designers and professionals working with tourism development, place-making and destination planning. © 2026 selection and editorial matter, Fredrik Hoppstadius, Mekonnen Tesfahuney and Ulrika Åkerlund; individual chapters, the contributors.

Tourism digitalization is often understood and implemented in a technocratic sense and implicitly viewed as a solution to perceived shortages in tourism development. Despite this, little attention has been given to the fact that digital technology has spatial and social implications and is strongly intertwined with tourism places and various actors. We address this intending to identify the dominant disciplinary and contemporary research approaches to tourism digitalization through a systematic review of 2 480 publications from the Scopus database. With inspiration from geomedia studies, an explorative thematic analysis found a separation that poses a risk of technology development being detached from its actual context, suggesting that tourism scholars and practitioners would benefit from broadening their readings and critically addressing the interconnection between technology and tourism places. 

Even though urbanisation is the prevailing trend in modern societies, the net migration balance of Sweden's largest cities has been negative for the past few years, and overrepresented among these migrants are families with young children. The stories of counterurbanisation have often relied on rather stereotypical representations of unsustainable city life versus sustainable rural life, thus strengthening the much criticised rural-urban binary. The aim of this article is to explore how the counterurbanising families' ideas of "a sustainable everyday life" developed during and after the migration event. We uncover the needs, ideological foundations, practices, capacities, social atmosphere, temporality, and place-based understanding of one's own role and responsibilities in society by studying what the families do in their everyday lives, what they are striving to achieve, and how they understand sustainability. Counterurbanising families represent a driven group that are not primarily guided by economic wants-as many of their active choices are lifestyle-driven. Our theoretical foundation highlights the structures and dimensions of social sustainability, relational place, and learning, contrasted with the subjectivity of everyday life in the urban-rural transition. Forty-five in-depth interviews (1-2 h) were conducted via video conference software, and the material was analysed using thematic analysis. The findings indicate that the views and understandings of social sustainability among counterurbanising young families highlight place-based needs and conditions, with implications for sustainability and mobility research, individuals, and contemporary society as a whole in navigating the somewhat diminishing rural-urban dichotomy.

This article presents an action-research study investigating a spatially sensitive innovation process of place-based experiences in a rural area of Sweden. Lately, there have been a growing number of initiatives focused on developing location-aware mobile media – geomedia technologies – to offer place-based digital experiences within tourism. Drawing on contemporary critical studies on geomedia technologies, we stress the importance of reflecting upon the implications of place-based technologies to minimise both the negative impacts on a place and the neglect of local perspectives. We conducted action-research interventions to unpack the complexity of developing place-based mediated experiences. The study makes an illustrative case of how interventions lead to more nuanced development processes of geomedia technologies while simultaneously fostering creativity. We argue that as action research allows researchers to intervene in media innovations, it identifies models for more nuanced place-based development processes, including local spatial and sociocultural perspectives.

Our changing climate foretells a future with continued large forest fires and extreme weather events, such as devastating storms, heavy rainfall, flooding, heat and drought. This project focuses on preparedness for this kind of events taking place while large, spread-out, and often uncertain, numbers of visitors are roaming the Swedish countryside – not seldom voluntarily or involuntarily of the grid. The conditions for crisis communication is changing with social media, apps and digitalization of information. Obstacles and possibilities for digitalization in the tourism sector in relation to the specific conditions of nature-based tourism needs more attention.

Tourists are a vulnerable group in crisis situations, since they are not acquainted with neither the place nor how to find information about the crisis and how to keep themselves safe. In parallel, the Swedish tourism sector is constantly growing, with new trends as ”vacation at home” and increasing numbers of international tourists visiting Swedish nature, and nature-based tourism is believed to see a significant increase in post-pandemic travel, as more visitors seek uncrowded destinations. A crisis can be devastating in nature tourist areas. Despite this, the tourism sector is often viewed as peripheral and is in some cases not even included in crisis preparedness planning.  

The aim of this study is to generate new knowledge and methods for incorporating the Swedish countryside tourism sector in crisis management and communication. Crisis management and risk preparedness and awareness, and collaborations and relations between the tourism sector and other crisis management actors (municipalities and public authorities) are in focus, as well as the nature tourists themselves.