It has often been claimed that contemporary societies are shaped by globalization; the rapid interconnections of societies, economies, markets, flows and information potentially linking all places in the world to each other. In search for experiences, variation, escape or comfort, individuals are travelling, circulating, and migrating between places, challenging the notions of ‘home’ and ‘away’, ‘everyday’ and ‘extraordinary’. This thesis addresses the ways lifestyle-led mobilities are produced and performed, by studying the mobility trajectories and experiences of Swedes dividing their time seasonally between Sweden and Malta. It explores how movers are faced with a structural framework that both facilitates and directs their choices concerning mobility, and how they interpret and respond to these structures. It also explores the imaginaries, meanings, and feelings for place, identity, and lifestyle that the movers negotiate through their mobility practices and through the links they create and sustain in places. Thus, this thesis is situated in an evolving field of research on lifestyle mobilities. Lifestyle mobilities are here defined as those mobility practices undertaken by individuals based on their freedom of choice, of a temporal or more permanent duration, with or without any significant ‘home base(s)’, that are primarily driven by aspirations to increase ‘quality of life’, and that are primarily related to the individuals’ lifestyle values. The thesis is based on four individual papers exploring different aspects lifestyle mobility. The aim is to understand how production and performance aspects of lifestyle mobilities are related, and how notions of identity and belonging are negotiated in relation to lifestyle mobility practices. The production aspect relates to those structures and frameworks that create, facilitate, or sometimes delimit opportunities for lifestyle mobility while the performance aspect focuses on individual agency and meaning of lifestyle mobility practices. The studies are based on in-depth interviews with Swedish movers in Malta, and focus on how structural frameworks and mediations influence the ways that movers manoeuvre, manipulate or adapt to structures and influences in order to arrange their life context to achieve ‘quality of life’. A second aim focuses on the ways that movers reflect upon their identities and belongings as they travel routinely between two (or more) significant places, and how this may influence mobility practices. It is concluded that structures and mediations are both facilitating and delimiting movers’ space of choice regarding mobility decisions. Through their agency, movers negotiate their space of choice by allocating resources and experience, accessing supportive networks and tailoring their access to entitlements. The production and performance aspects of lifestyle mobility practices are interlinked in complex ways.

The thesis The Vacation House as a Planning Dilemma deals with how the processes that generate meaning in space proceed in parallel both in everyday life and in the planning realm. Multiple dwelling, or having two homes, can be seen as a dilemma—one in which the planning system’s attempts to conquer an unruly reality conflicts with the ways people live. The vacation house phenomenon is not a neutral concept, but rather influences and is influenced by a variety of contexts. This ambiguity is problematic for practitioners of spatial planning, a field that strives for unequivocal concepts. My interest is primarily directed at the relationship between the intentions in Swedish legislation and their practical application in planning. These legislative and planning spheres are also influenced by what actually happens in a physical space and by the conceptions we have of the life to be lived in it. The purpose of the thesis is to create the conditions for a discussion of how a planning dilemma like multiple dwelling can be understood based on how the various actors in a space create meaning and on the internal competition among them for the preferential right of interpretation over concepts. The thesis actualizes several scientific issues for us to address: How is the concept of multiple dwelling contextualized in material space? How does the housing market portray conceptions of vacation living? How do municipal planners view having two homes? How do environmental and urban planning laws view multiple dwelling? I use Henri Lefebvre’s three-part dialectic of spatial theory in this thesis as a tool for general classification, to analyze spatial processes over time, and to clarify the relationships between the different elements of a space and different actors’ actions in a space. The focus of my analysis of the field of planning is the various kinds of representations made by experts. My analysis of such constructions is conducted at the level of discourse. In order to understand how such spatial representations are constructed and how they compete with one another, I have taken a discourse analytical perspective inspired by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. The results of my thesis have shown that problem solutions lead to different planning constructions depending on the underlying conception of the vacation house, whether the vacation house is conceived as the Other Home or the secondary home. My analyses have shown that modernism’s striving for systematization and functional separation doesn’t work, at least as applied to housing. We must question the premise of functionally distinguishing between housing forms as a means to conserving natural resources. / fritidshus, planeringsdilemma, fysisk planering, lagstiftning, dubbel bosättning, miljöbalken, annonser, fastighetsmäklare, Lefebvre, Laclau, Mouffe