ABSTRACT
The challenges of peripherality have been a recurring theme in discussions and policies on (economic) development, usually against the background of a concern about inequalities and the implication for the legitimacy of democratic governments (Diamond, 1992; Muller, 1988). The European Union’s decades-old regional policy is a particularly high profile and potent illustration. There, peripherality, or marginality, have usually been geographically defined as edges of a territory, based on distance from a central core, and this has been projected as a negative condition that needs to be tackled by reaching out to the margins and reducing distance through improved communication lines (infrastructure projects). There are a number of examples of travel isochrones covering Europe as a means of showing ‘reachability’ (Dubois and Schürmann, 2009). By implication, these lines also point to the peripherality of places as those with low accessibility. It is in this context that the Nordic countries are frequently seen, from a metropolitan western European perspective, as ‘on the edge’ of the continent, as inherently peripheral. This includes a close association with rurality, sparseness of population and remoteness. Yet it also means a positive association with qualities such as being ‘unspoilt’ and offering ‘escape’ from urban hecticness and overcrowding.
