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For as long as people have met and gathered in small villages, in larger cities, at religious events or along travel routes, for shorter or longer periods of time, people have engaged in trading goods – the forerunner of today's retailing. Hence, retail is an economic sector with a long history (Stobart & Howard, 2019). Most early retail took place in town centres, establishing the relationship between trade and urban agglomeration (Coleman, 2006). A general rule has been that retail is located where the customers are (May, 1989), owing to the economic potential of proximity to larger consumer markets. This is true not only for retailing, but for almost all economic activities in liberal markets (Scott, 1998), and the general trend is a drainage of investments, companies and people in sparsely populated rural and peripheral localities in favour of urban agglomerations (Lindgren et al., 2017), at least when it comes to physical retailing, which is the focus of this chapter.

Second-home tourism is an important driver and result of rural and urban change. However, the focus for second-home research has typical contextual traits. In a Nordic context, the archetypal image of a second home – in research as well as in the mind’s eye of the public – is that of a detached (single-family) rural housing, such as a cottage or cabin. Much less attention has been paid to other forms of second-home dwellings, like flats, or mobile second homes such as caravans, trailers, and recreational vehicles. In this paper, we expand the horizon of second-home research beyond the detached rural house. Using georeferenced microdata on detached houses and flats, along with survey data on campsites, we explore the prevalence and spatial distribution of different dwelling types in the total second-home stock of a rural region in northern Sweden. The paper contributes to second-home literature by incorporating a wider, inclusive, perspective of the phenomenon, showing that this type of tourism is more widespread than previously thought. Furthermore, the study highlights the relation between these dwelling types and different parts of the tourism supply, with flats and mobile second homes being highly concentrated to urban centres, ski resorts, and nature-based tourism amenities.

Kapitlet diskuterar planering av begravningsverksamheten i Sverige, som Svenska kyrkan ansvarar för i 288 av Sveriges 290 kommuner. Trots att kyrkan saknar planmonopol är den ansvarig för att tillhandahålla begravningsmark, vilket skapar ett komplext samspel med kommunernas planeringsansvar. Urbanisering, en åldrande befolkning och kulturell mångfald påverkar behovet av kistgravar, särskilt i krissituationer där MSB rekommenderar beredskap för 5 % av befolkningen. Begravningsplatser fungerar inte bara som platser för de döda utan också som viktiga gröna och kulturella rum. En GIS-baserad analys visar att framtida efterfrågan är särskilt hög i storstäder som Stockholm och Göteborg, medan norra Sverige har lägre efterfrågan men ett betydande inflöde av avlidna från andra regioner. Strategiska rekommendationer inkluderar att integrera begravningsplanering i nationella och kommunala strategier samt att se begravningsinfrastrukturen som en del av samhällets krisberedskap.

Internet platforms enabling the short-term rental of private homes are an increasingly important provider of tourist accommodation and a challenge for urban policy. Airbnb is frequently blamed for encouraging property owners to remove their homes from the permanent housing market, thus contributing to the gentrification and displacement of local residents. Empirical research on this topic has been mostly represented by qualitative or indirect quantitative studies, which focus on changes in housing availability rather than the actual population. In our study, we fill this gap by presenting a study of the city of Stockholm, using two sources of georeferenced data: information on properties offered for rent on the Airbnb platform and micro-data on individuals and properties derived from the national statistical office. We verify whether the high number of apartment rental offers on the Airbnb website contributes to the high number of apartments that became uninhabited during 2012–2016. Using both aspatial and spatial autoregressive models, we find that the platform expansion does have a significant effect on the number of emptied apartments, and thus conclude that the presence of Airbnb contributes to the process of touristification, understood as the replacement of permanent residents with non-permanent populations. This confirms that when analysing urban population change and the gentrification process, mobile populations should be considered. Context-aware multiscalar and relational approaches are needed to understand the interrelation between human mobility, housing markets and regulations, and transnational internet platforms.

This study focuses on the contradiction of mobility and immobility in relation to interred human remains. While society generally embraces human mobility, once individuals pass away and are disposed of, mobility ceases to be the norm. Some counties, like Sweden, has a rigid burial legislation that prohibits the re-location of interred human remains. However, both society- and climate-related events are increasingly affecting the eternal rest of the deceased. Utilizing quantitative data on all cemeteries in Sweden, this study aims to assess and analyse the potential magnitude of future large-scale moves of human remains due to expected impacts of climate change, and to put this into a relational context of norms and laws. Results show that climate change poses an apparent risk to cemeteries in Sweden, especially in the south-west of the country, and that this is mainly caused by increased risk of landslides and erosion, as a result of expected increased precipitation. A low estimate state that by the end of this century, some 30.000 interred remains and some 146.000 living survivors will likely be affected by climate-related risks.

Döden beskrivs ofta i rumsliga termer och har egenskapen att den intensifieras på vissa platser, men påverkar och får konsekvenser på andra platser. Således kopplar döden samman en rad platser som på ett eller annat sätt är viktiga för den avlidne, de efterlevande och ibland även för samhället i stort. Döden är inte en marginell företeelse utan snarare ett universellt samhällsfenomen och en ständigt pågående process, men som ofta sker i det fördolda. Denna Ymer uppmärksammar döden som samhällsfenomen utifrån ett rumsligt perspektiv och av forskare från en rad olika discipliner. Bokens syfte är att visa på vilken bredd och relevans som forskning om döden har, men även vilka teoretiska bidrag denna tematik kan ge upphov till.

The European North has long attracted travelers, the selling point often being the availability of nature and wilderness. Recent developments, however, suggest a greater variety of tourism motivations, including new products such as dogsled tours, aurora borealis watching, snowmobiling, and stays at ice hotels. Many of these firms use names containing the term ‘Arctic' or similar terminology related to imaginations of the Far North. The chosen terminology is considered one example of the process of ‘Arctification'. However, there is a limitation in descriptive knowledge about the overall Arctification of the region’s tourism industry. Hence, this article aims to illustrate the Arctification of the tourism industry by mapping the changing geographies of firm names. Through its results, the study aims to contribute an understanding of how firm naming is part of the tourism production, and how this influences the reimaging and delineation of regions. The study uses a descriptive quantitative approach, extracting data from the Retriever Business database. The results show a clear development of tourism firms increasingly using Arctic terminology in their firm names. Also, the tourism firms’ locations show patterns of spatial differences related to the region’s natural environment, population density, infrastructure, and the firms’ age.

The effects of second-home tourism on property markets has been one of the key debates in second-home research. This has been discussed in association with property speculation, financial vulnerability, gentrification, displacement, and rural development. This paper studies the market prices for all detached homes traded on the open market in Sweden during 1999–2017. It investigates how the market values of second homes have developed over time and how they vary spatially. Results show clear and growing spatial inequalities over the period. It emphasises the dynamic interplay between different forms of dwelling use and the close relationship to spatial context.