Rewiring remote urban futures? Youth well-being in northern industry towns

Many small remote cities in the circumpolar North lose population. Our starting point is that such settlements have a viable future when young people see perspectives for their own well-being there. This article studies such perspectives using cases from northern Russia and northern Finland, based o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of youth studies 2023-11, Vol.26 (10), p.1257-1272
Main Authors: Stammler, Florian, Adams, Ria-Maria, Ivanova, Aytalina
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Arctic/Subarctic
Case studies
Civil society
Finland
Housing
Kinship networks
Russia
Social networks
Towns
Urban areas
Urban schools
Urban Sustainability
Well being
Youth
Youth Well-being
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Summary:Many small remote cities in the circumpolar North lose population. Our starting point is that such settlements have a viable future when young people see perspectives for their own well-being there. This article studies such perspectives using cases from northern Russia and northern Finland, based on empirically grounded fieldwork. Emphasising contextuality, we analyse how authorities, civil society and industrial companies provide conditions for youth well-being in northern industrial settlements. The results show, how a viable urban community could look like for young inhabitants: crucial determinants are education, social networks and family ties, nature, housing, comfortable infrastructure, meaningful work, mobility and good health. While many of the results resembled between the case study regions, among the differences in the two countries, we found that in Finland notions of a good life in the North base more on individual preferences than in Russia, where collective notions are more important. In conclusion, we suggest that youth well-being becomes a principal component of concepts of viable urban communities, including but not limited to such cases as Arctic peripheral single-industry towns.
ISSN:1367-6261
1469-9680
DOI:10.1080/13676261.2022.2081493