It is a beautiful sunny winter’s day at Riisitunturi national park—exactly like in those thousands of images posted recently on social media. We are here to get acquainted with what we have been reading about on the news: the sudden popularity of the small national park due to its snowy, almost magical landscape. It is the winter holiday week in southern parts of Finland, and we expect to meet with many people.

We decide to take a little trail that seems to be popular. The officially unmaintained snowshoeing trail is well-trampled down and the snow is easy to walk in almost any kind of boots—and even with a designer handbag (as we saw later, on our way back). We walk between the trees towards the top of the fell in a narrow line stepping aside every now and then to give space for those coming down. The trail feels crowded, and we can hear the ripple of conversations that seem to carry like sound on water along the fell. All tourists, we assume. Walkers, dogs, snowshoes, skis, sleds and a lot of mobile phones capturing the perfect spot in the landscape for a selfie, trying to create images of being with magnificent crown-snow loaded trees, surrounded only by wilderness. The trees disappear when we approach the top of the fell, so we can see further away into the landscape more clearly. Fellow visitors are like small moving dots scattered around the top. Once we reach the top, we try to look for a quiet corner to have a hot cup of tea and admire the wide-open landscape on the edge of the wilderness. Someone’s drone is buzzing over our heads. From further away, where the sound is not heard, the trek of black figures across the white terrain resembles a crowd of pilgrims. This is it then—the rush hour at Riisitunturi national park that has hit the headlines lately (Fig. 12.1).

Fig. 12.1
A photo of a heavily snow-laden ground. The trees and plants are covered with snow. Many people are standing in line for their turn to ski.

(Photo by Seija Tuulentie)

Rush hour at Riisitunturi national park

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The field notes from a sunny winter day at Riisitunturi national park set the scene for our observations of mobile encounters in a tourism landscape. We have come to explore the mobility practices that shape the peripheral rural landscape in a place that would be typically described as marginal, immobile and static, but as such inviting to enjoy the peace and quiet of nature around. The Nordic tradition of freedom to roam—allemansrätten or everyone’s rights—forms a basis for enjoying the Finnish landscape. It allows locals and visitors alike to enjoy the recreational use of nature regardless of the land ownership as long as it does not cause damage or disturbance to the landowners, the use of land, nature itself and others enjoying the right to free roaming.

Different kinds of activities related to moving in nature, e.g., berry picking, walking, skiing and fishing, have always been an important part of the Finnish way of life and cultural heritage. The tradition has been passed on from generation to generation by spending time together in outdoor activities and simply by setting an example of how to move in nature and interact with the landscape. The do’s and don’ts of everyone’s rights have been accompanied by local customs and understanding of what is considered appropriate, bringing forth also the idea of moral considerations related to landscape practices (see Granås forthcoming). The understanding of appropriateness, however, is shifting as the world around us changes. Increased awareness of the impacts of climate change, the diversifying community of recreationists along with renewed interest in nature-based tourism mean that we should re-evaluate the accustomed ways of being with the landscape. At the same time, interest in the potential of the landscape for various purposes makes the seemingly marginal places in the periphery a focus for many. Hence, the entangled morality of landscape practices is influenced both by changes in the landscapes and the social and cultural diversification of the practitioners (Flemsæter et al. 2015).

Contemporary times are often described as an era of mobilities, where everything—people, things, ideas and commodities—are in constant movement either physically or digitally. The implications of these mobilities are reflected in the ways we are organising and structuring social life through various mobility practices; building connections and networks between places, within a place as well as across space and time. This mobility turn (Sheller and Urry 2006) also emphasises the interdependencies of different types of mobilities that vary in scale, from global to local and mundane to extraordinary. Rather than seeing movement as something that occurs only between locations or in connection with a particular activity, the world is seen as relational, in motion and constituted by movement (Ingold 2011). It becomes embodied in various encounters with not only mobility practices, places, humans and non-humans but also with values shaped by these connections and mobilities across space and time. The relationality of mobilities reflects also our understanding of place as a “throwntogetherness” (Massey 2005); an intersection of movements, networks, routines and performances that keep the landscape in constant process of becoming.

Tourism can be seen as an example of one of the major elements stretching the interdependent mobilities from local to global and vice versa (Mavrič and Urry 2009). Diversifying touristic mobility practices, as well as local ways of moving in the landscape, disrupt the idea of rural places as marginal and rather encourage us to look beyond the apparent immobility by paying attention to complexity of mobilities related to local everyday practices (Milbourne and Kitchen 2014). The change in mobility practices brings along changes in landscapes, such as easy access to marginal landscapes, or well-maintained tracks to picturesque spots in the wilderness, which then again are linked to the skills needed to move along in the landscape, the moral ideas related to how to “deserve” the landscape—and the ideas of what constitutes a marginal landscape (Flemsæter et al. 2015).

In this chapter, we focus on shifting place mobilities under the framework of everyone’s rights and explore the ways in which it turns into moral aspects of landscape practices and questions of ownership. We approach the concept of mobilities from the perspective of relational ontology and investigate how the different types of interconnected local and global mobilities transform into becoming in a landscape. Here, we apply Ingold’s (2000, 2011) ideas about landscape as a process of temporalities, various movements and mobilities that are continually unfolding and changing. Thus, the landscape is never static, never the same, although often associated with these words. Instead, the landscape can be described as in a continuous state of “becoming” (Ren and Jóhannesson 2017; West et al. 2020). Accordingly, in the chapter we describe the plurality of ways locals encounter tourism in the landscape of Posio—a plurality that arises from embodied movements, continually unfolding processes and diverse overlapping relations among visitors, tourists, locals, park managers and diverse non-human actors in the landscape. In what follows, we seek to demonstrate how the seemingly marginalised local mobility practices and local ownership in the landscape are affected by the intertwined encounters of other mobility practices.

Riisitunturi as a Marginal Place

Riisitunturi national park is situated in a small peripheral municipality, Posio, in south-east Lapland, Finland (Fig. 12.2), where it covers an area of 76 km2. The state-owned park was established in 1982 especially for nature conservation and scientific explorations but is now utilised mainly for touristic purposes. From a natural-scientific point of view, the value of Riisitunturi national park is related especially to its sloping bogs and it was established because of them. The abundant precipitation and thin soil enable bog vegetation to grow even on steep slopes of the Riisitunturi fell. The fell’s western slopes are covered by hanging bogs which are also some of the world’s steepest bogs (Metsähallitus 2023a). Another important feature is the snow-packing on the spruce trees, a mixture of ice, hoarfrost and snow attached to trees in winter that increases with altitude and also damages the trees (Jalkanen and Konopka 1998). Thus, humid climatic conditions and relatively high altitude in Riisitunturi create the snow-covered trees that are nowadays the attraction as they create a photogenic white forest with human-like features.

Fig. 12.2
A map locates Posio municipality and Riisitunturi national park. It marks the main road, regional roads, and municipalities.

(Map by Michaël Virgil Bishop)

The location of Posio municipality and Riisitunturi national park in south-east Lapland. Data: National Land Survey of Finland and Finnish Environment Institute

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Posio municipality is one of the peripheral, rural regions in the north facing the challenge of declining population and lack of services. Consequently, it portrays the image of a place neglected, forgotten and frozen in time—that is, a marginal place. According to the demographic forecasts for the period 2019–2040 (Statistics Finland, 2019), Posio is one of the places facing the biggest depopulation in Finland with a forecasted decrease from 3,154 in 2019 to 2,147 in 2040 (−31.9%) At the same time, the population is not only declining but also ageing. The Posio welfare plan for the elderly population 2021–2025 anticipates that the share of people over 65 years old will reach 57.5% of the population in 2030 (Posio municipality n.d.).

In the last couple of years, the landscape and image of Posio have, however, changed. Posio has become a meeting point facilitating many kinds of encounters combining life in a remote rural village, scarce resources, creative industries as well as social media hotspots forming queues on the paths in the popular national park. However, as a contrast to the tourism and recreation landscape, a very different landscape opens up in the opposite corner of the municipality, where the area is used for a wind farm and as Finland’s largest snowmobile free ride area. This more industrial land use is also supported by the municipality.

Riisitunturi national park, which according to the park manager was mostly frequented by the local people over the course of its 40 years of existence, has started to gain more attention quite rapidly. As demonstrated by the visitor numbers of the national parks, the COVID-19 global pandemic enhanced the growing interest in nature and nature-based activities among domestic visitors, but this only partially explains the growth at Riisitunturi. In addition, one of the major reasons for the growth has been linked with the pictures of crown-snow laden trees that seem to have become an iconic symbol of Riisitunturi national park on social media. It seems that “it is simply impossible to take a bad photo of them”, as an employee from the municipality says. Parallel to this, the number of visitors in Riisitunturi increased by 53% from year 2019 to 2020 (Metsähallitus 2023b).

The national park has become a major element in the marketing of Posio municipality both in terms of promoting it as a place of residence and as a place to visit, placing tourism mobilities at the centre of attention. Due to the buzz on social media, Posio suddenly emerged from the margins into the limelight and Riisitunturi began to attract new types of visitors, including those not accustomed to roam in nature. A feeling of wilderness within easy reach of the parking place is part of Riisitunturi’s attractiveness. The need to create new types of trails and products for the national park has been recognised by the park management and the municipality in order to better serve the visitors and enhance tourism mobilities in the region. The narrow road leading to the national park has been improved and the parking area enlarged to better serve the increasing traffic. There is a little coffee hut at the starting point providing not only food and drinks, but also rental fatbikes and snowshoes for visitors. The change in the number and type of visitors has been noticed by the regional national park managers—there has been an increasing demand to develop one-day round trips and other shorter day trips with clear markings of scenic hotspots for a wider public. As a result, the most popular trails mainly attract tourists, while the locals seem to move to less crowded trails. This leads us to the question how the traditional local mobility and land use practices of hunting, fishing, reindeer herding, forestry and harvesting berries as well as other recreational practices might have changed.

Our chapter draws from ethnographic field work conducted in Riisitunturi national park and Posio municipality. We first visited the area in February 2022 in order to get acquainted with the region and its different stakeholders, activities and landscapes. During the visit, we also met with representatives of the municipality and the national park to gain more insights into the ongoing developments in the region. Since then, we have interviewed members of the local community representing different livelihoods and land use practices, followed the public discussion about the region and its developments as well as investigated representations of Riisitunturi national park on social media. The following analysis emphasises different narratives regarding mobilities in the landscape. The role of landscape in tourism is inarguable, yet extremely complex. By definition, tourism takes place in a tourism landscape. At the same time, the landscape is not a separate, isolated space for tourism activities, but a meeting place of different kinds of mobilities and land use practices combining local and global as well as human and more-than-human worlds (Urry 2004; Ingold 2000; Massey 1991). Thus, the following discussion is organised according to three main narratives emerging from our ethnographic research: destinization of a marginal tourism landscape, ageing in the landscape, and landscape ownership.

Destinization of a Marginal Tourism Landscape

Posio has been marketed as a dream destination for nature lovers with its many lakes, ponds and fells. Yet, the commercialisation of activities is not uncomplicated, especially on privately owned lands. “It is difficult to commodify nature-things, since you need permission from the landowner and so forth”, says an employee of the municipality describing the tension that occasionally takes place in Posio. He describes the launch of a social media campaign in 2020 related to visiting all the forested hills of the municipality and in doing so, encouraging people, especially locals, to get acquainted with the nearby places utilising everyone’s rights. The social media campaign is an example of destinising (see Granås 2018) proximate nature or one’s usual setting into proximity tourism (Díaz Soria and Llurdés Coit 2013). It illustrates how destinations are produced as well as consumed through “a meticulous process of staging, framing, and photographing views and panoramas” (Jóhannesson and Ren forthcoming, see also Urry 1990). The process of becoming a destination or destinisation as conceptualised by Granås (2014, 2018) takes place both through formal management practices and commercial tourism use, but also through the touristic gaze and performances conducted by the locals. The campaign gained publicity both in the local newspaper and in the different social media channels of the municipality. This campaign was welcomed by the landowners although there has been resistance on their part to more formal or commercial use of the land and existing paths, e.g., as biking routes or for husky safaris.

Images of the region and its forested hills started to spread on the social media channels of the municipality at the same time, with visitors’ photos of the by now famous winter landscape of Riisitunturi national park and its snowy trees and hills. Other examples of public attention include famous journalist Ilkka Malmberg’s series of articles about a piece of land in Posio. The articles were published in the largest subscription newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat, followed by a book called Hectare (Hehtaari in Finnish, 2012). Internationally, the landscape became known through a nature film released in 2018, Ailo’s Journey, about the reindeer Ailo wandering in the landscape of Posio. These various gazes and performances were entangled with the landscape of Riisitunturi, becoming part of how the landscape was perceived, negotiated and produced (Granås 2018). Unlike other forested hills in the region, Riisitunturi fell began to get crowded, attracting more and more visitors from a nearby ski resort as well as visitors passing through on their way further north. The newly found wider public interest in national parks, enhanced by the global pandemic along with the attention on social media, was a boost for tourism in the landscape of Posio.

According to the park manager, the national park users were traditionally local people visiting the park for recreational purposes—going to a certain spot, having a coffee break and then coming back. The need to build actual routes, especially short round routes, originated from the attempt to manage the already high number of visitors to another nearby national park by offering them more options. However, rather than restricting the tourist flows, the sudden limelight on social media only spread the flows also to Riisitunturi. Currently, good quality tracks, which should fit a wide user group from hikers to skiers, bikers and snowshoers, are required and park management tries to balance between the carrying capacity and conservation of nature, while at the same time finding reasonable ways to deal with the requests and needs arising from the public.

These examples show how the process of becoming a destination occurs through local and global events and movements that involve both human and non-human influences. By identifying encounters, events and movements entangled in the destinising process, we can observe the contingent and emergent characteristics of tourism, describe their complex environmental relations and identify who are involved and what is at stake when tourism surfaces in a peripheral place (Granås 2018, 50). The role of social media and visitors in the process of producing a destination is significant, but becomes closely entangled with the local actors, practices and developments.

The increasing demand for good quality and easy access raises confusing feelings among the local people. As one of them describes, it is annoying when people claim that there are “failures in the product or services”, suggesting that the landscape itself has become a product. The commodification of landscape enacts Posio as a playground—as peripheral, marginal wilderness, relating it to historical colonial endeavours on other continents (Granås 2018). Furthermore, framing Riisitunturi as an accessible place in wilderness through the impressive posts on social media creates certain expectations among visitors and enhances the production of the region as a destination. It also leads to encounters of normative opinions. Another local interviewee points out how he appreciates slower visits and wants to focus on producing tourism services based on this mentality, but there are many people with different goals “who just visit Riisitunturi national park to take a picture for social media”. He gives an example of Asian tourist who wished to have a quick visit to the landscape in an outfit that first and foremost looked good in the photo but was not practical for −35 degrees Celsius. In the Norwegian context Flemsæter, Setten and Brown (2015) have pointed out how speed and rhythms seem to be deeply entangled with the moralities of what ‘counts’ as an appropriate way to engage with nature. The locals emphasise this further, by telling how they are astonished how those who come just for a quick visit do not bother to take their garbage away with them but leave even toilet paper in the landscape from a few hours’ visit.

Yet, as mentioned by one of the interviewees, it may be difficult to voice dissenting opinions about the impacts of tourism for the region as the public opinion embraces the potential it holds for local development in the periphery. Thus, moral landscape practices are strongly influenced by the landscapes with which the practices are associated (Flemsæter et al. 2015), meaning that since the Riisitunturi landscape is becoming perceived as a place to be consumed easily, the moral understanding of what is appropriate in the landscape also changes. Furthermore, the process of becoming a destination and the mobile encounters in the landscape are often discrete by nature; these processes and encounters illustrate how tourism development can be neither accidental nor inevitable, but possible and contingent (Granås 2018, 55). In the context of Posio region, the iconic photos spreading on social media present the place as a wilderness-like periphery, yet accessible. It creates a certain kind of place expectation for visitors that encourage tourism entrepreneurs, municipality and other stakeholders including the park management to develop practices meeting these expectations. However, at the same time, the spot in the limelight maintains the image of the region as a peripheral place to visit leaving also other local narratives and their role in place making in the margins.

The examples from Posio region demonstrate well the interplay between formal and informal management in the destinisation of a tourism landscape. For example, social media is good in producing iconic landscapes, but the formal management in the park also aims to take into account the potential scenery when planning routes. The difference here is that park management pays attention to the carrying capacity and conservation of nature, whereas social media users are often not aware of the rules and regulations in the park, but act based on assumed everyone’s rights. Hence, expectations and suggestions for the landscape vary depending on the perspective from which it is looked at.

Ageing in the Landscape

The declining population and especially the ageing of the population are reflected in the mobility practices of the local people. Some of the interviewees see this also as a shift in the landscape; a shift from mobilities of muscle power to motorised vehicles for traditional land activities in nature, such as fishing, hunting and reindeer herding. Also, the number of active fishermen and locals collecting berries for commercial use has decreased as the population has aged, which has been a similar trend in whole Finland for some time (Pouta et al. 2006). Commercial berry picking is nowadays practiced mostly by foreign pickers, which occasionally sparks heated discussion among locals. Critics claim that commercially organised berry picking makes it difficult for inhabitants to fully use natural resources (Peltola et al. 2014). There are no legally binding rules or regulations concerning commercial berry picking with everyone’s rights, for example, on private lands or in areas near local housing. The commonly accepted distance from housing is based on the code of conduct and the traditions in considering what is appropriate behaviour and what is not are strong. Local people are aware of the arrival of commercial pickers and make sure to pick berries for their own needs before their arrival.

Although the local people we interviewed still collect berries, fish and hunt for themselves, there is an impression that the local people in general tend to move less in the landscape due to ageing and busier lifestyles. This change may lead to another shift in the landscape—from traditional local mobility practices into tourism mobilities that manifest in diverse ways, such as movement by snowmobiles, snowshoeing, skiing, biking and hiking, just for the sake of enjoying nature and the landscape. These shifts are underlined when representing the landscape with iconic pictures related to enjoying nature that can result in simplification of the place (Granås 2018), and further deepen the controversies between local and touristic mobilities in the landscape.

However, the effects of increased tourism mobilities, such as well-maintained routes in the national park, also benefit the local people since those routes are more accessible. This may reflect in the mobility practices of ageing locals changing from the more purposive roaming in nature closer to the recreational outdoor practices applied especially by the visitors. Thus, the relationship in the landscape changes, not only due to the interplay of local and global, human and more-than-human encounters, but also due to personal histories and changes in one’s embodied capabilities. Flemsæter, Setten and Brown (2015) have pointed out that tensions related to everyone’s rights often relate to the normativities that link to knowledge, skills and socialisation of moving in landscape. Thus, even though the local ways of using the landscape may in the future, or partly already, seemingly resemble touristic ways of moving in the landscape, there is a form of knowing and skilled “handling” of the landscape (Ingold 2011) that is still based on long-term embodied engagement with this specific landscape.

History and family traditions are present in the local mobility practices that have been passed on from generation to generation. For example, berry picking can be seen as transgenerational narrative and history, in which the practice of picking berries often in certain locations is transferred from one generation to the next by picking berries together. These lands are often seen as areas with immemorial enjoyment rights, and they are shared within families (Länsman 2004). Repeated visits to familiar places can be seen as a local mobility practice interweaving their own family traditions into the landscape that becomes part of one’s personal biography.

With regard to fishing, catching brown trout is an interesting example of how the traditional local nature use practices of elderly locals are in collision with the regulations and general discussion on sustainability of fisheries and emergence of catch and release in fishing. Brown trout is such a small trout that fishing is not allowed by the law. However, one interviewee describes the dominant local attitude by saying that brown trout forms a local stock and even the smallest ones are mature and not going to grow to the measures of legal catch. He continues fishing for brown trout and describes the activity as something really traditional and genuine practiced especially by older people, and something that cannot be harnessed for touristic nature use. With tourists, he fishes mostly for pikes. The interviewee describes how the fluctuation of brown trout stocks has followed societal and environmental changes: people who until the 1990’s caught brown trout are no longer able to continue with the activity and the stocks recovered for a while. Nowadays, the stocks have declined again especially due to the humus coming from forest ditches.

Landscape Ownership

Destinisation of the landscape as well as ageing in the landscape are closely linked with the third narrative regarding landscape ownership. There are various types of ownership that emerge in relation to the tourism landscape of Posio. The formal, legal forms of ownership and management are intertwined with informal ownership, reflecting the complexities related to moral practices in the landscape.

National parks in Finland are managed by Parks and Wildlife Finland, which is a unit of a state-owned enterprise Metsähallitus that provides environmental services for private individuals and major companies (Metsähallitus 2023c). The primary purpose of national parks is to ensure the diversity of Finnish nature. At the same time, touristic and recreational use of national parks is increasingly important. In principle, everyone’s rights apply also in national parks, but there may be additional restrictions that should always be given priority. The interviewee from Metsähallitus says that balancing between these two purposes and the diversifying group of recreationists creates a challenge to their management. People see a picture of a specific place in Riisitunturi on social media and want to go there but simply “do not think about the fact that everyone’s rights do not apply exclusively in that area, that they should find out a little more about the regulations, what can be done and what cannot be done”. Hence, skills and knowledge related to engaging with nature as well as to everyone’s rights have become major considerations for the park management (Flemsæter et al. 2015). The question of informal power and morality is also faced when planning new routes. Sometimes visitors discover a gem in the landscape and post pictures of it on social media. Information about the scenic spot spreads quickly and people start to request directions to it. Nature around the location may, however, be very fragile, requiring protection. The question here becomes about whether to build routes to keep visitors on a guided path or to try and prevent people from finding the place at all. The effects of social media in Riisitunturi and its surroundings provide an example of how unintentionally occurring practices can disrupt the existing order in the landscape (Setten and Brown 2009, 192). In doing so, it also brings up controversies about who is entitled to make claims over the landscape and how these claims are positioned in relation to others.

Relationships with and understandings of nature are formed through various mobilities in the landscape for different purposes (Lund 2005; Setten and Brown 2009). As such they are shaping the perceptions and experience of landscape ownership including moral evaluations of the acceptable codes of conduct connected to particular landscapes. Ownership by local people can be seen as informal ownership that is based on long-standing traditions formed through practices of living on the land, moving in the landscape and perceiving the possibilities in the landscape. However, as described by one of the local interviewees, it is contested by the increased amounts of recreationists that “in a way conquer the possibilities of the local people” in relation to places. Although everyone’s rights enable anyone to roam in nature for recreational purposes regardless of land ownership, the local codes of conduct may appear more significant than the formal ownership. Occasionally, they collide with everyone’s rights in situations that disrupt the harmonic co-existence in the landscape. In Posio region, this exemplifies in residents’ claims that the foreign berry pickers use the backyards at the centre of the village instead of wilderness areas as they should, or when denying the use of private land for commercial dog sledding as a matter of principle rather than protection of nature. The new practices and the increasing number of new practitioners in the landscape also result in locals needing to confront their own practices and identities that are being assigned as marginal because the landscape is often seen as an empty wilderness. This dismisses the local traditions and histories embedded in the landscape (Setten and Brown 2009; Bursta et al. 2023).

Local ownership also becomes contested between local stakeholders, for example, in issues such as wind power construction. Wind power plants benefit economically the municipality and the landowners but may conflict with other interests regarding the use of landscape. A big power plant is planned in the neighbouring municipality, Kuusamo, and both the local reindeer herders as well as the local tourism association in Posio made an appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court as the wind turbines would disturb the reindeer pastures and scenery from Riisitunturi. However, only the reindeer herders’ appeal was considered as tourism was not seen as a relevant party in question (KHO 2022, 12). This example illustrates the ways in which landscape can also be seen as a contested site of physical and symbolic powers and as expressions of subsequent polity (Setten and Brown 2009; Olwig 2019) leaving some voices in the margins, while emphasising others.

A local reindeer herder gives another example illustrating the ownership of the landscape by reindeer that leads to tensions with second-home owners: “The phase of construction of a second home is most awful, when the land is on gravel. A reindeer goes there to avoid the mosquitoes (räkkä), and there is nothing to eat. Falls asleep on the construction site, wakes up and leaves droppings there, so the constructor will not be happy. And the reindeer does not know that it has entered a wrong area”. Hence, the non-human ownership of the landscape is also often marginalised—or not heard at all, except through the local embodied traditions that are entangled with non-human agencies, or through the more formal conservation processes and discussion that take place in the context of national park management.

Mobile Encounters in Peripheral Tourism Landscape

The three narratives emerging from our ethnographic field work, destinization of a marginal landscape, ageing in the landscape and landscape ownership, are illustrations of the multiple overlapping mobility practices and encounters taking place in Posio and Riisitunturi national park. The tourism landscape of the region builds on these shaping encounters that reflect both formal and informal processes in the destinization of the place (Granås 2018). At the same time, these mobility practices illustrate the encounters of digital, mundane, touristic and other land use mobilities involving both human and non-human actors. Thus, the narratives demonstrate that tourism landscapes are not merely a planned space on the margins of the everyday (Franklin 2008), but something that develops in interaction with various flows of events, practices and mobilities. They are difficult to manage without paying attention to the moral dimensions of the landscape ownership.

Shifting place mobilities are creating controversies between different land use practices and approaches of being with the landscape. These controversies are also reflected in the contemporary understanding of everyone’s rights, which in itself has become contested. One example of this is the confrontation between mobilities based on transgenerational narratives and embodied histories and the more recent mobilities inspired by social media and the visual appreciation of the landscape. The diversification of ways of moving in nature, comings and goings of second-home owners and visitors combined with the complexity of mobilities bring forth an idea of landscape being continuously shaped and defined by the creative use of natural environments and interaction between human and non-human. Thus, to address the controversies calls for a more caring approach and practice to tourism landscape (Jóhannesson and Ren forthcoming; West et al. 2020) that is based on holistic and inclusive wellbeing. A more holistic and inclusive approach would challenge the simplifications that often relate to marginal landscapes—such as northern landscapes that are often seen as mere resources, or voices in the margins. Instead, the skilful handling of the landscape based on long traditions and the new forms of mobilities should not be discussed as controversial, competing practices, but rather as intertwined entanglements shaping the landscape.