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The major aim of the thesis is to study various issues regarding the supply of services in the rural areas of Northern Sweden characterized by sparse population. Localities in these areas represent the lowest hierarchical units in the urban-place-system. With the help of different analyses of regio­nal development, a strategy to obtain a long-term, consolidated and socially acceptable standard of services is presented. Indispensable commercial ser­vices have been chosen for special examination. More precisely, the central question in the thesis is: How can households in sparsely populated areas, re­mote from major service centres, maintain an acceptable level of service ac­cessibility primarily through the use of existing social capital? The thesis is divided into ten chapters. It starts with a chapter on the growth of regional policies in Sweden. A survey of the urban-place-system with special reference to conditions prevailing in the four northernmost counties in Sweden between 1950 and 1980 is presented in the following chapter. The third chapter deals with theoretical premises and central con­cepts about service distribution. The main characteristics of the historical development of permanent services in rural areas are presented in the fourth chapter. The fifth chapter contains a survey over the central and local governments' measures to support the commercial services in such areas. In the second half of the thesis two separate approaches have been used. The first approach, which is used in chapters six and seven, analyses changes in the accessibility to services during a given period of time. A municipality and a county are made the subjects of such an analysis. The second approach is developed in the reamining three chapters of the thesis. It is focused on a pre­sentation of a knowledge-base and ideas for a planned contraction of servi­ces, which should lead to a minimum loss of social welfare for the popu­lation. The eighth chapter discusses a method for co-ordinating transport and service planning at the municipal level and the ninth chapter contains a policy-model concerning services in relation to other economic activities within a municipality. The final chapter contains a general discussion about possibilities for developing a long-term consolidated urban-place-system for sparsely populated rural areas. / digitalisering@umu

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