Lotta Braunerhielm (lotta.braunerhielm@kau.se), Eva Olsson (eva.olsson@kau.se) and Lars Aronsson (lars.aronsson@kau.se)
What picture of Urban and rural areas that are marked are central. During the last decades the city has been seen as the area of possibilities and rural areas as "the problem". Our thesis is that urban areas have possibilities for social and economic innovations in cooperation with the city if you take a different perspective on growth than the generally used perspective. This includes everything from resources, products, services, social entrepreneurship to aspects of living environment. How can for example experience-based competence, social relations, living areas and lifestyle-satisfaction be upgraded? How can you develop areas and use different combinations of social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital? A widened definition of growth includes robust social, economic but even ecological dimensions. Our main purpose is to study a perspective of possibilities for the growth of periphery in cooperation with the city. The purpose has a strong connection to the goals of Europe 2020 concerning development and especially the alternative way of looking at growth.
Our study focuses on Sweden and Norway. The countries have different circumstances because of different regional policies, laws and cultures etc. There is cooperation and dynamics between the continuum city - periphery, for example concerning widened labor market areas. The area of our concern is placed in the tension between the capital Oslo in Norway and the region center Karlstad in Sweden. What does this mean for the peripheral area in between? Our purpose is to identify possibilities and needs which will end up in new strategies for economic and social development which in the long run can result in better support end basis for political decisions as well as basis and support for regional political actions. We also anticipate that the use of an alternative definition of growth will give unexpected results and effects compared to the dominant definition of growth. Our goal is furthermore that our research will contribute to social innovations and social entrepreneurship which will be debated and which will feed politicians with arguments for sustainable development. The project is based on earlier research and cooperation with Cerut from Karlstad University and Ostlandsforskning from Norway and is partly based on results from earlier studies.This project will form the basis for further studies in order to utilize and strengthen border region's collective resources, and linking together urban and rural areas across the border.