They leave everything behind in the Netherlands;friends, family, jobs and careers in order to start a new life in what theycall the land of opportunities, namely Sweden. Here, in the county ofVärmland in a little, rural town named Hagfors they see a chance to a brighterfuture and the possibility of accomplishing a better quality of life. They wantto buy houses, start companies and explore a new way of life in this land ofpromises. While people are migrating from the Netherlands, inhabitants ofHagfors are moving out to big, urban cities that can offer more possibilities.This is the reality for many rural areas like Hagfors, they lose populationthrough out-migration. Despite the negative population trend, the municipalityregains some of its lost inhabitants through the international migration fromlarge Dutch cities. The purpose of this thesis is to examine how the practiceof place marketing has been used by Hagfors municipality in order to attractnew inhabitants from the Netherlands. Which place marketingstrategies have been utilized by Hagfors, how can the effect of theseapproaches be measured and how is the Hagfors brand perceived by the Dutch immigrants?These are the research questions that have been answered through qualitativeinterviews with municipal employees and Dutch immigrants. The results implythat Hagfors have marketed themselves through the internet and the EmigrationExpo in Utrecht but these strategies have not had any effect on the immigrants’motives for moving to the area. Instead of actively tryingto receive more immigrants to the area Hagfors municipality should invest timeand money on the Dutchmen who are already living in the area.The conclusion that Hagfors has not developed a brand platform has preventedthe Dutch immigrants from creating a uniform image of the brand.

Rural place is often overlooked in interaction design research. This thesis is centered around an analog interaction between humans and a 35 ton stone in a danish forest, on the rural island of Bornholm. With a methodological approach influenced by Donna Haraway's essay 'Situated Knowledges' the author approaches her site-specific topic both as a local, a tourist and a researcher. The thesis offers a close study of the interaction with the stone, and explains how this natural occurring interaction, has physically shaped the landscape around it, but also reveals the curation imposed upon rural place and and how this curation affects our sense of place. The researcher suggests that counter-curations can be used as a method for site-specific interaction designers, and exemplifies this by curating a natural site as well as a rural village site. The stone in the forest opens up for a project about the multiple identities of rural place and how theses are shaped in deep intertwining and tension between the past and present, human and nature.

Exploring both political aesthetics and the politics of aesthetics to outline an environmental ruralism for art in public spaces, this practice lead research project postulates a “complemental practice”, outlining its methodology and contexts for operation, the rural, spaces of leisure and the public realm. It is a response to threats to spatial and environmental commons from heritage, place-making and nostalgia, psychological inhibition such as a sense of global contingency and widespread economic exploitation. Responses by artists to this situation can be characterised as a binary of dialogism (Kester, 2004) and relational antagonism (Bishop, 2004), i.e. consensual/collaborative or antagonistic/autonomous practices. Informing both is the work of Jacques Rancière who theorises an ethical and social turn in the arts. Through both commissioned and self-initiated projects this thesis offers an interpretation of Jacques Rancière’s conception of dissensus (Rancière, 2010) modulated through an application of the work of philosopher Slajov Žižek on environmental politics and complementarity - the inscription of the universal within the particular (Žižek, 2011). The thesis’ originality lies in this theoretical synthesis which sets out a complemental practice based on dissensus and the undecidability of subject and context, but which dismisses any inflexible schema of either aesthetic autonomy or ethico-political egalitarianism. In addition it suggests an approach to practice in this field and a situation for this - a dissensual infrastructure for the common public realm which is socially relational and evolutionary over time.