Urban growth in northern peripheries and new development opportunities for sparsely populated hinterlands

Project description

Rapid urbanisation in sparsely populated northern peripheries has been a common phenomenon in many developed countries, including Sweden, the United States and Australia, where a few regional cities have grown substantially in recent decades while their rural hinterlands have declined both demographically and economically. How these growing ‘cities of the north’ may contribute to future development in the rural hinterland is currently not well understood. This project will compare different ‘cities of the north’, including Umeå in Västerbotten, Anchorage in Alaska (US), and Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory, and their impacts on ‘spillover’ of capital into rural areas. The research will examine how urban growth has impacted on the movement of people between the city and the countryside, and how these ‘mobilities’ have contributed to the development of human, economic, social and cultural capital. The movement of people is a critical factor in mobilising knowledge, labour, skills, and finance, and changing mobilities for the purposes of living, working and recreation have been a key feature of northern economic and human geographies in recent decades. The research will be conducted over 5 years and involve a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. It will examine changing mobility patterns emerging from different ‘cities of the north’ through secondary population and visitor data sources. It will then analyse economic and regional development policies and other public documents to identify why these patterns have emerged. The project will finally focus on several rural community case studies to understand how mobilities have stimulated new investment, knowledge transfer, and the development of social and cultural capital in the hinterland. Experiences will be compared between the three jurisdictions to improve our understanding of ‘cities of the north’, their changing mobility dynamics, and their implications for northern development.

Keywords: urban growth centres, population mobilities, core-periphery spillover, sparsely populated north