Mapping the Socioeconomic Landscape of Rural Sweden: Towards a Typology of Rural Areas

Hedlund M. Mapping the socioeconomic landscape of rural Sweden: towards a typology of rural areas, Regional Studies. Definitions of the rural have been the subject of numerous academic papers. This paper argues that the a priori urban–rural continuum model should be abandoned in favour of a more open approach. In advancing this argument, a socioeconomic typology of rural Sweden is developed by means of cluster analysis. A total of 3983 areas were sorted into five clusters and 16 sub-clusters. One-third of the rural population lives in the middle-class countryside within the urban shadow (12%) and working-class countryside within the urban shadow (22%); the bulk of the rural population lives in countryside outside the urban shadow (25%) and manufacturing periphery (28%); and a smaller share resides in the resource periphery (12%). It is concluded that location-specific typologies based on high-resolution data that avoid a priori assumptions of rurality give great insight into rural heterogeneity.