Dissertation (part 1)

Monday 26 November 2007 was a day with an unexpected amount of snow. This resulted amongst other things in a beautiful white track and field stadium, white grass and white trees next to the small conference centre Östra Mark on university ground.

This was also the first time we had to produce a text about our dissertation, describing our aim, method, questions, literature and earlier eresearch in the field. The whole steering group was present, as well as some interested PhD students from earlier "generations." We all got helpfull feedback and enough comments for working on our "sketch" the rest of the year.

A month earlier, we had been to Åkerby, close to Nora, to witness two days of networking with external lecturers and commenting on other PhD students' work. This was a good experience, since this laid the ground for our work and we learned how to receive criticism with dignity :)

The end of the first course

It's been a while, but I'll summarise the first course and the final two seminars we had in October and November 2007. The fourth seminar was interesting and exciting, as PhD student MJ presented his work on Experience Economy in Bergslagen (Avesta) and connected this to the work of the Swedish Knowledge Foundation. In the restructuring areas of Sweden, new efforts are made to focus on the value of experience industries. Film in Göteborg, Food in Hällefors and so on. Special meeting places are founded and funded with many millions of crowns! What it all comes down to is that life is all about experiences. We discussed the effects this has on planning and local creativity.

This was linked to theories and literature by Allen J. Scott (The cultural economy of cities) and Scott & Dominic Power (the production of culture).

The fifth and final seminar took place on 8 November and here we discussed each other's essays. Everyone had read one of the other texts in particular and was supposed to discuss them in general for about 20 minutes. I wrote my essay about the value of theories of urbanism in the context of Dutch migration to Swedish rural areas. Other topics were: New Urban Politics (ALF), the concept "Networks" (AT), The late-modern city (MH), Social polarisation and immigrants (ML), New urban forms (PS) and Consumption, choice and place (SL). We realise now that our little group is all about studying identity!

Excursion Bergslagen

On Tuesday 23 October, it was time for my first meeting with the possible research area. We (C & me) started by changing the car tyres to spike tyres. After that, and a free coffee at McDonalds to kill the time, we drove towards Nora. We passed Nora after about half an hour and arrived at Måltidens hus around 10.45 am. This was after 75 km. Only one km later, we arrived in Grythyttan “centre”, where we wanted to take a coffee. Gästgiveriet was really nice, but also expensive, so we went to Neerings.

It was really hard not to show my Dutch background there, as there were so many typically Dutch things: Haagse Hopjes, Calvé pindakaas, hagelslag, speculaas and so on. We took a coffee and a tea there and just sat wondering how this choclad and ice boutique worked. We saw both Mr and Mrs Neerings, and we were listening to the Swedish of the other employees. Two women, of which one spoke well Swedish and the other had an accent. She probably wasn’t from Sweden, but probably neither from Holland. Interesting! Two schoolgirls came to the boutique and wanted to make a film, which they would show at the “du behövs” day in week 46 in Hällefors Folkets hus.

Later on, we drove to Hällefors, only 10 km from there, and took a look at Folkets hus. We also walked around and saw kommunhuset, turistbyrån, and Polstjärnan, where placement is located. After an hour we set for Kopparberg. We passed Vildmarkskrogen on the way, and couldn’t not take a look. But they were closed, as the owners were on a holiday. To Holland? The view over the nature reserve was marvellous! We ate lunch at Bredsjö Gård, after about 105 km.

In Kopparberg, we spent an hour in the afternoon. We walked around Tingshuset and I met and spoke to an employee at Kommunhuset. Just casually, he mentioned that I had come to the right place if I wanted to talk about Dutch migrants. After a visit to gammal & antic and walking by the church , we returned to Örebro again. That was the end of the first excursion!

Seminar in Eskilstuna

The first conference that I participated in as a PhD student was in Eskilstuna, at a campus of Mälardalen University. It is quite close to Örebro, about one hour by train in the direction of Stockholm. I combined the trip with a visit to Eric, whom I interviewed for my brother's website about wintersport: www.onlinewintersport.nl.
The next day, Thursday 18 October, it was time for the conference so I went o meet colleague Max at the venture: IdéLabben, at the Institute for Innovation, Design and Productdevelopment, close to the central station. The day started at 10 am, lasted until 4 pm and we heard a lot of speakers from different fields. One of the most interesting was Maths Isacsson, who has conducted research in Bergslagen for 35 years. He talked about the projects in teh region, what it meant for the regional cultural heritage and the restructuring plans. Being an industrial area in decline, the region profited from EU's Structural Funds, especially after Sweden joined this Union in 1995.
Now, as in many other deprived areas in Europe, buzz-words around which the discourse focuses are Cultural Industries and Experience Economy. He spoke about the changing image - or rather images - of Bergslagen in media, with the local inhabitants and in Sweden.
Other speakers were a journalist, businessmen, researchers from other regions such as Norrbotten and even a guest speaker from Newcastle, a city situated in an industrial restructuring area. There was even a short discussion about the arrival of Dutch families to Bergslagen and what it means for local politics when an entrepreneur from abroad wants to turn a forrestcottage into a restaurant for instance. The cottage in the forrest has been abandoned for years without anyone really taking an interest, but when some small sized enterprise wants to buy it in order to commercialise it, this can cause many protests!
There was a short movie about the history of Bergslagen and the local culture of male blue collar workers resisting education and creativity. This, together with the usual networking and a lecture by an art and image scientist about a painter that painted these stereotypical heavy industy images (Johan Ahlbäck) made that he conference was well worth visiting.
Now, off to Åkerby for the next conference!

Globalisation?

A train, a major road and signs of two multinationals

in this picture, taken from svampen in Örebro.

The urban economy

The third Seminar dealt with abstract concepts such as Globalisation and "Space of flows". We had read texts by Saskia Sassen en Ash Amin from the book A companion to the city amongst others, each representing their view of how the postindustrial city adapted to the new world order. A swedish text in which the author attempted to operationalise Manuel Castells ideas of the space of flows and the space of place was also part of the literature. The arguments in this text were basically that "people live at places while the power reigns though flows" and "the elite is cosmopolitic - the people is local."
Our assignment was to operationalise these abstract concepts by describing in about one page (A4) what we would research in case we'd write about the new urban ecoconomy and how we would do that. We had a text by Helle Nörgaard as an example, in which she tests Saskia Sasssen thesis aboutglobal cities and social polarisation on the case study of New York. She looked at income level and compared the income level of the newly immigrated labour force with that of the established white urban professionals working in FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). Nörgaard found little evidence for Sassen's thesis.
The value of a seminar like this is that it really makes you think about how easywe use abstract terms such as globalisation. But it is a lot more difficult to define these terms and texts really need a lot of "unpacking" before we, the readers, really understand it and even more thinking before we can come to concrete terms and phenomena that are empirically testable.

Second Seminar

The aim of the second seminar was to discuss the difference between Humanities (Hum) and Social Science (Sam) when it comes to researching. History is a subject taught at Humanities while the other subjects (Political Science, Human Geography and Sociology) are taught at Social Sciences. At Hum., research is more inductive, starting from the bottom, defining the phenomena and possibly formulating a theory for the specific research case. In doing so, emphasis is mostly put on uniqueness. At Sam., research is more deductive, starting from a theory, using a number of existing definitions and applying that to the research object. That makes that emphasis is put more on generalisation.
We also discussed the use of comparative studies and studies at the borderline between two disciplines. We had read two books, one where sociologists (Mats Franzén & Eva Sandstedt) try to write a historical overview of the Swedish debate about neighbourliness in the 50's, 60's and 70's and one where a political scientist (Natasha Vall) tries to compare two cities: Malmö and Newcastle. Comparatuive studies are valuable but difficult, which probabaly is why there are so few PhD Student who 'dare' to write a comparative dissertation.
Do I dare?

Urban and Regional Studies

I might have forgotten to give a more detailed insight in how the research school is organised and what I mean when talking about "we". Well, the idea of the interdisciplinary research school " Urban and Regional Studies" is that PhD students and researchers learn from each other's research in different disciplines. There are about 24 members of the research school and the closely linked Center of Urban and Regional Studies. The people that I work most closely with are the other 6 new PhD students: Peter, Human Geographer, Susanna and Maja (both Sociologists), Anna-Lisa (Political Scientist), Andreas (Historian) and Marcus (Social Work Scientist). Those are also the people that take the course "The city in its context". Together with two other courses, seminars and conferences this is the common basis of the PhD students at URS.

First Seminar

After four weeks, and not much news so far, I can provide a small summary of the two seminars that we have had. The first seminar in this text and the second seminar in another text.
The theme of the first seminar was "The city as research object". We read texts by Friedrich Engels, Jane Jacobs, Louis Wirth, Lewis Mumford and Robert Putnam. These texts represented a wide range of disciplines and Zeitgeists. Engels described the slum conditions in 1845 Manchester. A city then at the height of Industrial Revolution. The article can be classified as one of the first urban sociological texts. Louis Wirths' Urbanism as a way of life (1938) represents the thoughts of the famous Chicago School. He states that life in cities differs greatly from the rural way of life. The most important symbols of the city are the clock (time is money) and the traffic light (rules are needed everywhere, in order to regulate the large flow of humans). Putnam's text Bowling alone introduces the term "declining social capital" and states that the number of people in the USA that have been bowling at least once in 1995, is bigger than the number of people that went voting. However, these people play less and less in teams, and more alone than ever before.
It is interesting how all writers use terms such as Street Ballet (Jacobs), Urban Drama (Mumford), Public Plazas (Whyte) and Social Capital (Putnam). This illustrates the will and need of combining the socio-cultural and the economic-political aspects of urbanism.
Finally, an attempt was made to put our future work on a scale provided by Ronan Paddisson and another table by Ingemar Elander.
As it turns out, most of our works (including mine) can be placed within the socio-cultural tradition concerned with Urban Reconstruction. What I'm about to do next is to try to specify this more by looking at positivism and post-positivism. A course about Geographical theories, focussing on Karl Popper e.g. would not be a luxury!

What defines the city?

Is it functional or experiential factors, or a combination of both? How have cities grown in the past decades? Is the pace of growth depending on in which continent they lay and how densely populated they are from the beginning? What is actually the difference between urban and rural, is this difference dissappearing?

See some pictures from our introductionweek on Facebook! (facebook account needed though)
/Meimer

First course

Today, I received the course syllabus and schedule for the first course, called "The City in its context". It's a ten week course and we'll have a seminar every second week. Theme for the first seminar is "The city as a research object". Books I'm chasing now are Handbook of Urban Studies by Ronan Paddison (ed.) and The City Reader, by Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout (ed.s). We'll have a slow start, as we only read 100 pages for the first seminar. By the looks of the schedule though, the second seminar requires us to read 1200 pages. I'd better start right away!

Welcome!

The idea is not to write a diary-like blog, but rather to present excerpts from articles and papers that I write during my Human Geographical PhD-project at the University of Örebro, Sweden. Why do Dutch migrants come to Sweden? What purpose do Swedish communities have when actively recruiting Dutch entrepreneurs? How well integrated are Dutch immigrants in the Swedish local societies? It's questions like these that I will try to answer in the coming 5 years (2007-2012). Welcome and keep on checking this site!
/Meimer