Description
The worries and challenges around demographics, specifically regarding the aging populations of many European ruralities, are often seen as natural. Explanations include the need to offset costs of care and pensions with tax income from working people. However, this argument is not only used in relation to places and regions that are in control or directly paying for healthcare or services. Based on two rural case studies, the Llanidloes area in Mid Wales and Åsele in Northern Sweden, this presentation attempts to theorise the focus on youth and sometimes disregard for what elderly people bring to rural communities. Drawing on Sara Ahmed's work on the promise of happiness and how this is premised upon orientation towards 'happy objects', 'community' can be understood as a happy object. Belonging within a place or community is continuously produced in the tension between longing and belonging, future and present, and comparisons between place, trajectory and future hopes. If 'community' is seen as a happy object, it needs to be continuously reproduced, both in the present and into the future. Some residents work hard to orientate themselves towards community. Building community can be an uphill struggle to maintain services, sometimes also in opposition to broader narratives of the promises of urbanity rather than rurality. For these individuals, happiness might not be achieved now, but could be assured for the future. However, this requires future generations to eventually replace the old. Young people thus become symbols of the promised future and payoff for the work that goes into producing community.| Period | 07 May 2025 |
|---|---|
| Held at | RGS IBG Population Geography Research Group, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland |