Urban—Rural Flows and the Meaning of Borders

Abstract

This article focuses on political and everyday interplay and integration between city and hinterland, investigating borders and boundaries in such interplay. Five Norwegian city-regions served as the empirical basis for analysing two empirical fields. In the first field — everyday mobility and flow — institutionalized interactions between the cities and their hinterlands were analysed as well as objectives and meaning as motivations in everyday mobility in the city-region between city and hinterland. In the second field — urban-regional economic development policy — the questions addressed related to the degree to which governance networks are developed as a tool in local economic development policy, the geographical span such networks have, and the degree to which actors are motivated by the idea of creating a city-region where the importance of borders is decreasing. The issues were discussed in a theoretical frame related to urban and boundary theory.The results demonstrated the multitude of meanings with regard to borders and boundaries, underscoring how fundamentally different cognitive approaches related to borders and flows are constituent in the two empirical fields as well as how borders and boundaries are used to separate and connect in fulfilling purposeful ends.