This book examines places on the margins and the dynamics through which a marginal position of a place is created. Specifically, it explores how places, mostly in sparsely populated areas, often perceived as immobile and frozen in time, come into being and develop through interference of everyday mobilities and creative practices that cut across the spheres of culture and nature as usually defined. An emphasis is put on the multiple relations through which places emerge, where people compose their lives as best they can with their surroundings. A special concern is to explore the links between travelling, landscape and material culture and how places and margins are enacted through mobilities and creative practices of humans and other beings. The emphasis on mobility disturbs the perception of a place as a bounded entity and offers a useful and necessary understanding of places as mobile and fluid. Marginal places emerge as distinctive spaces through heterogeneous forms of mobility, their resilience and viability resting on the creative use of resources and on dynamic entanglements of human and non-human entities.

Each in their own way, the book’s chapters pay extended attention to what can be described as ‘undressed’ or ‘undesigned’ spaces (Veijola 2014, 2016). These are used or disused spaces that we conceive here as spaces of potentiality and creativity—spaces such as wilderness, old and new pathways, villages in decay, modern ruins and functioning as well as not quite functioning infrastructure. We put creativity and everyday life at the forefront in order to work with current conditions and imagine the future potential of undressed rural spaces. Thus, our approach attends to the complexity of the everyday and seeks to weave together the poetics of life (Jackson 2007; Mclean 2009; Lund and Jóhannesson 2016) to open up possibilities that unfold through more-than-human integration, giving nature a voice in debates and deliberation about the future. Thus, we follow how everyday more-than-human mobile activities stir up different layers of the past in the present, creating conditions for future entanglements. In this regard, encounters with wildlife and delicate flora give meaning to landscape that at first seemed to be an empty space. Thus, landscapes of alleged nothingness as well as industrial ruins, derelict farmsteads and infrastructures may become places of creative practices, connecting past times with current and future potentialities. This approach underlines that history is not one-dimensional and linear but rather fluid and fluctuating, a meshwork of multi-dimensional mobilities and happenings. The volume seeks to understand how places that seemingly have been left behind or appear to have limited significance are, for those who inhabit or dwell in them, neither behind, forsaken nor without meaning. Rather, their vitality stems from their mobile, dynamic past and present narratives of the comings and goings of people, ideas, things, resources and natural entities. It thus arises through more-than-human mobility and through balancing acts of creative entanglements that are continuously ongoing. Nevertheless, how mobility has occurred through time also depends on how places are differently located and affected by regional, national and global political changes and trends.

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In the contemporary Western world, tourism, as a practise of travel, is seen as one of the dominant forms of mobility and, given the capital that moves with it, has been defined as an industry as such. However, tourism seen in a wider context as a mobile practice is nothing new. In the past, explorers, cartographers, merchants and missionaries travelled distances to encounter unknown as well as known terrains, and military activities have through the centuries activated vast movements of people all around the globe. In fact, people have always been on the move in a world that has been shaped, and is being shaped, by mobile practices. The history of exploration, the search for natural resources and geo-political agendas still have repercussions today and affect contours of tourism mobilities in many parts of the world, including the Arctic and northern regions that are studied in this book (Abram and Lund 2016). A case in point is that the international airports and main gateways for international tourism to Greenland and Iceland were both constructed originally as military facilities for US forces during and after World War II. The location of these gateways shape the travel behaviour of visitors and thus affect the position of places in relation to centre and margins in the growing tourism economy. These and other past mobilities leave their traces in the landscape in the form of infrastructure as well as atmospheres and narratives that continue to shape places that in turn transform and assign new roles to these traces.

This demands a shifting understanding of the concept of mobility as it is used in the conventional social sciences. As Solnit (2000) has pointed out, the postmodern body invoked in social science is hypermobile as it is “shuttled around by airplanes and hurtling cars” like a “parcel in transit” (Solnit 2000, 28) rather than being seen as a relational, sensual and earthly being. The latter demands an approach towards mobility as more-than-human that emphasises everyday practices as mobile activities, acknowledging that humans do not live on earth but with it (Pálsson and Swanson 2016) and, furthermore, brings in temporal dimensions (Lund and Jóhannesson 2014). By this we mean a sense of history that is not one-dimensional and linear in its scope but fluid and fluctuating as it makes itself present in its absence (Rose and Wylie 2006; Lund 2013; Lund and Jóhannesson 2016). From this point of view, we argue that marginal places should be recognised as dynamic and mobile contact zones (Pratt 1992; Clifford 1997) that are characterised by how people travel in their dwelling and dwell in their travels (Clifford 1997; Germann Molz 2008). After all, it is the body that allows us to travel, and as bodies we are earthly sensual beings that are entangled and intertwined with their environment through the flesh of the world (Merleau-Ponty 1968).

In discussion on tourism as a tool for development, creativity has recently received attention (Brouder 2012; Jóhannesson and Lund 2017). This interest is grounded in a wider discussion on the role of culture for innovation and economic development, most often emphasising how the creative capacity of individuals is a decisive factor for the prosperity and competitiveness of regions and places (du Gay and Pryke 2002; Florida 2004; Gibson 2010). Tanggard (2013) points out that the usual understanding of creativity emphasises the individual and their ability to innovate, act as entrepreneurs and thereby respond to societal changes. According to this emphasis on the individual, some seem to be more creative than others, for instance, members of what Florida (2004) identified as the creative class. The discourse on creativity has also often been related to urban centres (Gibson 2010; Waitt and Gibson 2009) but recently this view has been criticised through studies of creative practices in rural areas (Cloke 2007).

In the context of place-making, it is vital to relate the concept of creativity to concrete practices in order to engage with and grasp place dynamics in critical ways. Hence, we approach creativity as relational, connected to improvisation and thus much more as a process rather than an end product in the sense of a novel innovation that marks a historical break or a separation between those who are creative and those who are not (Hallam and Ingold 2007; McLean 2009). As such, creativity as a process of improvisation is integral to daily activities and engagements with the world (Tanggard 2013). It refers to the ways in which societal order is continuously emergent through relational practices and how it depends on care in the sense of “enduring work that seeks improvement but does not necessarily succeed” (Heuts and Mol 2013, 141). This approach also underlines that innovation is accomplished through relational work (Callon 2004); it does not happen in a vacuum and is guided by diverse rationalities as much work on lifestyle entrepreneurship and social innovation has demonstrated (Peters et al. 2009; Ateljevic and Page 2009). When exploring place development and how people improvise future potentials it is crucial to follow these co-existing rationalities and trace how the spheres of nature and culture connect and emerge through creative practices.

In this context, landscape and material culture comes to the fore. Recent literature has acknowledged the agency of landscape as vital and affective (e.g. Ingold 2000; Bender 2002; Benediktsson and Lund 2010; Lund and Wilson 2010; Lund 2013; Tilley and Cameron-Daum 2017). As Pálsson (2013) states, undressed spaces “clearly illustrate the interconnected nature of the landscape’s formation processes, between the supposedly natural and cultural” (174). However, conventional views that regard culture as separated from nature often oversee the vitality and possibilities that messy materialities of in-betweenness entail (Edensor 2005, 2008; Pétursdóttir 2020; Olsen and Pétursdóttir 2014; Bille and Sörensen 2016; DeSilvey 2017). We regard landscapes as multi-layered and narrative agents, a meshwork (Ingold 2013) where pathways of past, present and future entangle and provide creative spaces of potentiality and co-creative improvisations (Edensor 2008; Pétursdóttir 2013; Pálsson 2013; Lund and Jóhannesson 2014, 2016). From a phenomenological perspective, landscape must refer to perception and thus the body; speaking of landscape is speaking of how these multi-layered and entangled meshworks are perceived and made sense of by the bodies that intertwine with them through their dwelling. In sum, we embrace the view that creativity emerges from more-than-human mobile entanglements and should not be examined in isolation as merely an individual and innovative practice.

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This book grows out of an international research project funded by the Icelandic Research Fund (grant no. 207144-051). As originally defined, the project largely focused on two areas in Iceland that have traditionally been considered remote or marginal: Melrakkaslétta and the Southern Westfjords. Iceland as such, of course, can be seen as geographically marginal as a semi-arctic land at the northern edge of Europe (Lund et al. 2016) and the two areas of study are also perceived as marginal within Iceland. The composition of the research team, however, quite naturally extended the project’s scope beyond Iceland to other areas which, as it turned out, are all located in northern or Arctic regions. Thus, two chapters deal with Iceland’s closest neighbour, geographically speaking, namely Greenland. If Iceland is seen as marginal, then Greenland must surely be defined as even more so; to illustrate this point from an Icelandic point of view, it may be mentioned that for Icelanders, the expenses of air travel to Greenland have traditionally been similar to those incurred by going to Japan. Other chapters focus on northern Finland, another region normally defined as belonging to the Arctic. The traditional name for the region, Lapland, is revealing in terms of its social and political legacy, since it refers to its indigenous people, now referred to as the Sami but previously called ‘Lapps’, a term now seen as derogatory. Historically marginal, this region is now receiving its fair share of global mass tourism. Yet, one person’s experienced margin must always be another’s centre, which brings forth the question about what constitutes perceived margins in both a national and global context. Importantly, margins also invite an examination from a temporal perspective in order to grasp how they move and shift and are understood through different mobilities at different times in different contexts. Thus, our situatedness in and entanglement with time, place and environment affects our sense-making; where we sense the margins change according to where, when and how we are situated in the world. This aspect of the whole discourse on margins is also addressed in the book, in guise of the simple fact, discovered by many during the recent global pandemic, that the marginal may be closer than we think; but the right to discover these nearby margins and be mobile around them may not be altogether clear, as discussed in the book through field work in north-east Scotland.

Margins are in play through a multitude of place performances. Visitors, wildlife mobilities, political agendas and discourses, images and narratives as well as the dwelling of seasonal as well as permanent residents play a part in the making of margins. As Bender has argued, landscapes are “time materialising” (2002, S103), and as such, forms of travel and dwelling are constantly emergent rather than fixed. What characterises most of the places focused on in our research is their public perception as peripheral, undressed and marginal. However, we take a different approach, seeing them rather as composed of and by a vast array of human and non-human actors. Places are never empty meeting grounds (MacCannell 1992), never non-spaces (Augé 1995). Rather, they are—should one take a closer look—arenas of enduring improvisation unfolding within multi-layered temporalities through mobile encounters, the more-than-human and the everyday.

The studies presented in this book are based on diverse methods that share an attentiveness to the performative character of research (Law 2004; Jóhannesson et al. 2018), seeing it as co-enacting rather than as describing realities. The amalgam of diverse methodological tools used by different authors helps to grasp and engage with societal conditions in place and to think and act towards new possibilities. Different methods prove useful in order to follow, involve and intervene into the narratives and realities of more-than-human fluidity. As well as engaging with other human beings, our encounters with non-humans, such as birds (Chapters 2 and 3), plants (Chapters 3 and 4), used and disused infrastructures (Chapters 6, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13), past and present materials (Chapters 2, 3, 5, 7 and 8) and other earthly creatures stir conversations that go beyond mere verbal communications. These are conversations that can evoke sensations, stir atmospheres, reveal controversies but first and foremost emphasise vitalities that need to be taken seriously into account when addressing more-than-human mobilities and understanding the becoming of places.

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What follows is a brief summary of each of the book’s individual chapters. In Chapter 2, “Sensing the common: On the mobilities and makings of sense”, Björn Thorsteinsson attends to the way sense is made between humans and non-humans, such as seabirds nesting on offshore rocks and with concrete, decaying silos at the heart of a remote fishing village. The question Björn raises concerns the modalities of sense and how they occur in lived experiences of mobilities at the margins—of nature and culture? Katrín Anna Lund, in Chapter 3, “Poetics of nothingness: Ordering wilderness”, continues at the margins of natureculture and takes the reader on a journey into wilderness as well as towards a sense of the way often-overlooked features and figures in the landscape bring the flow of movement to a momentary, sometimes poetic, standstill. Through attention to phenomena such as lichens, arctic terns and ruins, she demonstrates how one can be in touch with one’s surroundings by allowing for the narratives they entail to emerge when moving with them, thereby bringing out the mobile forces that constantly shape a place or a destination. Outi Rantala and Emily Höckert, in their turn, in “Multispecies stories from the margins” (Chapter 4), also cultivate the art of attentiveness to more-than-human ways of being and knowing by engaging in multispecies storytelling. They ask what could be learnt from mosses that have succeeded in surviving in nearly every ecosystem on earth longer than any other plant groups, ultimately suggesting that through attuning to mosses’ life-sustaining agencies; an appreciation can be reached of smallness and slowness as key features in living well on Earth.

Turning the attention more explicitly towards tourism, Gunnar Thór Jóhannesson, in “Sailing the seas of tourism – controversial encounters with past, present and future mobilities on the margins” (Chapter 5), traces how places are created through mobilities and tourism performances. Tourism is framed as an ordering that enacts realities rather than being a neatly defined industry or a sector—a dynamics of power that positions margins in relation to centres. A pivotal point of Jóhannesson’s analysis is the case of a grounded ship-turned-tourist attraction in Iceland’s southern Westfjords; an example of how places emerge through a thicket of interwoven mobilities and encounters in time and space. Whilst Jóhannesson’s chapter illustrates how the disused and grounded ship is becoming a tourist attraction, Carina Ren’s Chapter 6 concerns a formal decision-making process of figuring out a suitable role or a function for a disused infrastructure. Her chapter, “On re-dressing remote places. Imaginaries at the margins”, focuses on how place-related imaginaries are conjured at a naval base in Southern Greenland. Through the concept of re-dressing, Ren demonstrates how Grønnedal becomes the subject of contestation among local, national and foreign actors, primarily in relation to the question of reinvigorating the area as a tourist destination, thus feeding into ongoing, larger discussions of the possible future(s) of Greenland in general.

Chapters 7, 8 and 9 are all characterised by revisits of the authors to places they related to in the past and how their returns enforce different ways of relating and sensing the surroundings. Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir, in “On being moved: The mobility of inner landscapes” (Chapter 7), turns the gaze inwards, inquiring into the possibilities of a tourism that focuses on the inner landscape of the guest and the host, and, by implication, on how both are moved from within by the relations created in their encounter. Through her own journey of being moved by a personal landscape in the Icelandic north-east, Jóhannesdóttir examines how landscapes are not just visual outer phenomena that we look at from a distance but rather whole entanglements of materials, beings, senses and processes that are constantly moving with and being moved by each other. The Icelandic north-east also forms the background of Chapter 8, “Melrakkaslétta the meeting-ground: Performing qualitative research at the tourism margin”, where Þórný Barðadóttir follows the journey of her own doctoral research project, the focal point of which is the area of Melrakkaslétta, mostly bypassed by the recent global (and local) tourism boom. In spite of this, as Barðadóttir demonstrates, Melrakkaslétta is by no means an immobile place; rather it is a thriving venue for human and more-than-human mobilities and interactions, involving joy and well-being as well as various challenges. In Chapter 9, “Revealing place mobility by walking and map analysing”, Elva Björg Einarsdóttir turns the attention towards Iceland’s southern Westfjords, exploring through the methods of walking and map analysis how places are temporal and multi-layered, being obvious and hidden at the same time. Ultimately, she shows that by analysing maps and crossing them with the embodied experience of walking old routes; new knowledge can be created, providing better understanding of the past as well as of the becoming of a place.

Staying with routes but now on the paved road, Sigrún Birgisdóttir, in “The route into nature: The landscape of mobility” (Chapter 10), departs from the fact that, in Iceland, driving is the principal mode of transport and, thus, roads become central to visitors’ experience in the growing tourism sector. Through examining main tourist thoroughfares, old and new, Birgisdóttir argues that the road has an often-overlooked role in creating an understanding of the environment. This highlights the fundamental role of roads in constructing relations with nature through the transformation of landscape and by enabling mobilities.

Mette Simonsen Abildgaard, in “The satellite at the end of the world. Infrastructural encounters in North Greenland” (Chapter 11), also places an emphasis on infrastructures in an analysis of the processes of place-making and marginality. Through the notion of ‘infrastructural encounters’, derived from her research in North Greenland, Simonsen Abildgaard sheds light on the complex ways in which marginality is produced and sustained, as well as the role that telecommunication infrastructures play in shaping the experiences of those positioned as living ‘on the margins’. In “Rush hour in a national park – mobile encounters in a peripheral tourism landscape” (Chapter 12), Minna Nousiainen, Outi Rantala and Seija Tuulentie, in their turn, focus on shifting place mobilities through the concept of freedom to roam (allemansrätten, everyone’s rights), exploring the ways in which this concept adopts moral aspects related to landscape practices and questions of ownership. Through fieldwork in south-east Lapland, Finland, the authors illustrate how the landscape is turned into a destination and product, as well as the way that seemingly marginalised local mobility practices and local ownership in the landscape are affected by the abruptly increased recreational mobility. In a similar vein, Jo Vergunst, in the final chapter of the book, “Inhabiting the landscape through access rights and the Covid pandemic” (Chapter 13), examines the kinds of inhabitation of the landscape that are made possible by outdoor access rights in Scotland, making comparisons to the Nordic practice of allemansrätten. Vergunst demonstrates how the COVID-19 pandemic provided a particularly acute example of how political and legal structures can shape the everyday experience of movement, and in some ways also brought to light the ways in which governance is reified and made real through ordinary life. In the pandemic, margins came much closer to home and the forms of mobility used to access them changed. Vergunst explores the regulation and surveillance of local mobilities in the pandemic, as well as people’s everyday responses.