Moving Beyond the Urban-Rural Dichotomy : Understanding New Energy Landscapes in the Urban Hinterlands through Embedded Community Perspectives in Southern Sápmi

Abstract: In recent years, we have seen that global, national, and local governments have put sustainability goals on their agendas. Thus, at different levels and in different sectors, efforts are underway to promote a ‘green shift’, including the energy sector. As a result, landscapes of renewable energy sources are emerging in areas that have sufficient “empty landscapes” (LABLAB, 2023) – namely sparsely populated spaces that lie outside the administrative boundaries of cities. However, the discipline of spatial planning rarely discusses changing landscapes in the hinterlands and the resulting consequences for embedded communities. The city as an energy consumer is treated in isolation from its counterpart, the hinterland as an energy producer. In this context, it is unclear what interrelationships are present between the formation of ‘new energy landscapes’ (Pasqualetti and Stremke, 2018; LABLAB, 2023), the urban ‘hinterland’ (Brenner, 2016; Westlund, 2018; Brenner and Katsikis, 2020), and the realities of embedded communities there.The geographies in the Swedish province of Jämtland belonging to the territory of the indigenous Southern Sápmi offer a suitable basis for a study that could fill this research gap. Thus, the objective of this thesis is to raise awareness of potentially conflicting interests between cities - striving to become more ‘sustainable’ - and the emergence of ‘new energy landscapes’ in the ‘hinterlands’ by including two different perspectives: an urban economic lens on the hinterland and a non-urban lens taken from the lived everyday lives of Sápmi communities embedded in new energy landscapes. This thesis poses three research questions to which it aims to find answers by using qualitative semi-structured, problem-centred interviews. It thus follows an interpretative abductive research approach. Through the analysis of the empirical data, the thesis shows that a joint discussion of the two discourses (‘hinterland’ and ‘new energy landscapes’) can help to gain a new understanding of urbanisation processes by including the perspective of non-urban communities in questions of urban sustainability. Furthermore, the thesis serves as an eye-opener for spatial planners to incorporate indigenous knowledge and lived experiences into the field of urban studies.