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In Sweden, common elementary schools (folkskolan) were introduced in the 1840s. As a consequence, children started walking to and from school several days per week. The school route, as both place and practice, impacted society and families; it created new ways and needs in everyday life. From a time-geographic perspective, the article investigates children's mobility in everyday life in order to understand what walking to school encompassed. Moreover, whereas the common narrative of school routes in the past emphasizes distances and challenges of the journeys it often omits the adult world's comprehension and involvement. The aim of the article is to increase understandings of the school route as a phenomenon and its meanings in everyday life from a historical perspective. Through qualitative analysis of memoirs and societal discussions, the authors focus on the difficulties (conceptualized as "weights") that the school routes could entail and how the adult world tried to manage them (conceptualized as "reliefs"). One conclusion is that society and families were aware of, and tried to deal with, those hardships, and a second is that the school route was more than a distance. In this regard, variations in families' geographical and socioeconomic positions and the physical landscape played crucial roles.

In 2008 the Republic of Ireland entered an economic crisis as part of the global economic crisis. It was met with austerity measures, and Ireland has since experienced large cuts in state spending on health, education, and heritage. Across Europe, the effects of the crisis on heritage have mostly been highlighted in general or supposed terms rather than empirically analyzed. Based on interviews with state and non-state actors in the heritage sector, this paper investigates the effects of the economic crisis and austerity within Irish official heritage management. The crisis has brought changes to the ways heritage is conceptualised and dealt with from a state perspective. These changes are important to track because one key part of the continuous process of production of heritage and its values in society is the ways state heritage management frames and works with heritage. The analysis focuses on four implications: budget cuts; how the crisis creates uncertainty, pauses, and short-termism; an increasing ...

Second-homes are vital parts of the encountering of the rural in the Western World. The way they are perceived in society is important to explore as it can influence how and by whom this part of the rural is used. This paper explores the media construction of a specific type of second-homes in Sweden; cottages that since the 1950s have transformed from poor smallholdings to beloved second-homes. Besides being lived spaces, these cottages have become well known features of rural Sweden, symbols of national identity and described by media as rural idylls. They can be seen as having a cultural centrality in the revaluation of rurality and the shift towards post-productivist countryside in Sweden. But how could this type of humble cottage become so significant and what does the image of it really imply? This is studied through a discourse analysis of the representation of these cottages in a monthly home magazine from 1956 to 2008 with a particular interest in the production and naturalisation of them as important rural artefacts and national symbols. The paper discusses how material and immaterial dimensions have interacted in this construction process as well as possible social implications of the representations. Conclusively, the representations construct a restricted image of cottages and their users and of why cottages are important and should be taken care of. These representations are building on values, ideas and norms embedded in a highlighted and particular materiality which makes these seem innocent, natural and common sense. By exploring this the paper contributes to the wider inquiry into the discursive construction of the rural where seemingly innocent and natural ways of representing places, people and artefacts can produce strong and excluding norms and values regarding the rural and its users and uses.

In this paper we examine the notion that music in public space could be understood in terms of ethical potential, where new sensibilities for thinking, feeling, seeing and being with others might be imagined and practiced. We do this by considering how musical performances by migrants impact on inclusive forms of place (re-)making, affective enactments of public space and emotional accounts of belonging and ‘the other’. The paper draws on an ethnographic exploration of South American pan flute musicians, performing music at Sergels torg, a central square in Stockholm, Sweden. Through fieldwork with a combination of qualitative techniques, including observation, interviews and sensory methods such as photography, video and recorded ‘sound walks’ we trace the affective aspects of encounters with busking and the impact of music on place. We highlight the ethical potential of music in the experience of urban moments and its capacity to reconfigure space. We find that encounters with sound can produce new spaces of conviviality and inclusion; it can soothe, animate and soften urban spaces. However, a positive encounter with difference through sound depends on a favourable social, physical and temporal context, and because busking serves to make marginalised voices heard (both literally and metaphorically), it can be experienced as troubling for precisely this reason. Thus, we need to take into account the full complexity of the dynamics between sound and place, in considering this relationship as a novel window to the ethical potential of the urban encounter.

Research on the relationship between music and place has highlighted the importance of music — in terms of both consumption and production — for how people experience, feel and perceive places as well as how they act in those places (e.g. Johansson and Bell, 2009). Connell and Gibson (2003: 192) state that ‘Music, through its actual sound, and through its ability to represent and inform the nature of space and place, is crucial to the ways in which humans occupy and engage with the material world.’ Simultaneously, scholars contributing to the so-called ‘mobilities turn’ in the social sciences since the 1990s have argued for the understanding of social and cultural life as inherently mobile. However, the relationship between music and mobility has remained underexplored in both literatures on sound/music and the wide-ranging literatures on the experiential dimensions of mobilities. In this chapter we address this gap by exploring how live musical performances in an urban public space come to matter in a number of ways for local mobilities (both physical and imaginary), and the tensions that arise between global flows and local place-making. Given the theme of this anthology, we also aim for this chapter to contribute to a wider theorisation of the relationship between representational and non-representational dimensions of urban place-making, through a lens of musical mobilities.

I enjoyed reading this book. It examines the relationship between Irish society and its landscape in a lively, tangible and personal way. McGrath asserts this relationship as unsatisfactory and fil...