In June 2019, a group of researchers travelled to three places far from the urban centres in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway to explore new public spaces emerging in the face of rural decline. We went in search of new spaces created by or together with local people, creating new common uses in disused or underused built environments and landscapes. In our previous research we had observed that the design of such public spaces plays an increasingly important role in the development of attractive and liveable rural living environments in the three Nordic countries – despite different spatial and institutional conditions and different national spatial development policies. But what does this mean on the ground? With our travelling transect we wanted to learn from different places and people and gain practical embodied experiences about emerging new public spaces, how they are created, used, and managed and how they transform rural places and everyday life.

The three places we visited reflect different spatial conditions of remote Nordic rurality. From the popular Danish surf spot Klitmøller on the North Sea coast in Thy with a hinterland of flat and (in the Nordic context) relatively densely populated farmland to the Swedish (former) mill town of Fengersfors in the forests of Dalsland to the Norwegian fishing town of Vardø on the Barents Sea above the Arctic Circle.

This website offers impressions from Klitmøller (DK), Fengersfors (SE) and Vardø (No) in the form of a travelogue in text, interviews, photos, and videos as well as the archive of an exhibition we created to share and discuss our insights with local key actors in a joint follow-up workshop in Copenhagen in December 2019.