ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book demonstrates how specific relationships between mobility and place are crucial in the making of societies. The ways in which people in Northern European peripheries have been coping with distance is a powerful case of how societies are produced. An integrated pursuit for the book is to analyse in greater detail how transport, communications, migration, transnationalism, tourism and travel engender social obligations and figurations. Places may be enacted through their roles as arenas where people are likely to meet or do so contingently. Thus, even though the establishment of a place can be planned for, places are generated through non-predictable meetings between people. Places are not construed out of nowhere but involve materialities, politics and imaginations, comprising people's engagement with their physical-material environment. Practices of place enactment directly involve nature, politics of nature and imaginations of nature.
