Echoing through the lecture theatres, conference halls and pages of the contemporary Urban Studies discourse is the oft-repeated refrain that today over half the world’s population live in urban areas, and that by 2050 this proportion is expected to be upwards of 70%. The place of the leftover 50% of people inhabiting a vast and seemingly forgotten 98% of the planet’s rural territory is externalised, apparently lying outside the purview of marching urbanisation. Yet the theory of ‘Planetary Urbanisation’ has emerged in recent years positing a contentious epistemological questioning of Urban Studies’ focus sites, objects and processes. In this it argues for a reorientation of the field towards the ignored rural hinterlands of ‘extended urbanity’ falling under the influence of the fluid process of urbanisation which is transforming the countryside through processes of rationalisation, functionalisation and disintegration. Critiqued as overly abstract, empirically shallow and puritanically ignoring form, this paper investigates and experiments with the theory of planetary urbanisation in a grounded study of a corridor of the Swedish countryside and the village of Röstånga. It does so by a concrete, detailed and dualistic approach to sites of extended urbanisation, integrating both form and process in its analysis. This research exercises this analysis through extricating the city-bound flâneur out into the non-city through a phenomenological 60km, 2 day walk from the city of Malmö to Röstånga. Arriving in Röstånga, this paper then turns its attention to multiple, triangulated methodologies of mapping, observations and interviewing in order to bind our flâneur reflections to the built environment of rurality. In doing so, this research details a changing spatial and social landscape of the Skåne countryside and the village of Röstånga with results exposing an urbanised rurality of hybridity, control and decay and a village of operationalised suburbia, of an externally orientated centre and of disparate social innovations. A discussion of these results then exposes a rural realm simultaneously surrendering to its new reality of extended urbanity and desperately searching for meaning and purpose within it; a landscape wilting under what this paper terms as the shadow of post-political urbanisation. This research than calls for ‘politics of the possible’ in a re-politicisation of the rural and concludes by challenging planners, architects and governments to re-imagine alternatives for this vital if forgotten space.

In recent years, we have seen that global, national, and local governments have put sustainability goals on their agendas. Thus, at different levels and in different sectors, efforts are underway to promote a ‘green shift’, including the energy sector. As a result, landscapes of renewable energy sources are emerging in areas that have sufficient “empty landscapes” (LABLAB, 2023) – namely sparsely populated spaces that lie outside the administrative boundaries of cities. However, the discipline of spatial planning rarely discusses changing landscapes in the hinterlands and the resulting consequences for embedded communities. The city as an energy consumer is treated in isolation from its counterpart, the hinterland as an energy producer. In this context, it is unclear what interrelationships are present between the formation of ‘new energy landscapes’ (Pasqualetti and Stremke, 2018; LABLAB, 2023), the urban ‘hinterland’ (Brenner, 2016; Westlund, 2018; Brenner and Katsikis, 2020), and the realities of embedded communities there.The geographies in the Swedish province of Jämtland belonging to the territory of the indigenous Southern Sápmi offer a suitable basis for a study that could fill this research gap. Thus, the objective of this thesis is to raise awareness of potentially conflicting interests between cities - striving to become more ‘sustainable’ - and the emergence of ‘new energy landscapes’ in the ‘hinterlands’ by including two different perspectives: an urban economic lens on the hinterland and a non-urban lens taken from the lived everyday lives of Sápmi communities embedded in new energy landscapes. This thesis poses three research questions to which it aims to find answers by using qualitative semi-structured, problem-centred interviews. It thus follows an interpretative abductive research approach. Through the analysis of the empirical data, the thesis shows that a joint discussion of the two discourses (‘hinterland’ and ‘new energy landscapes’) can help to gain a new understanding of urbanisation processes by including the perspective of non-urban communities in questions of urban sustainability. Furthermore, the thesis serves as an eye-opener for spatial planners to incorporate indigenous knowledge and lived experiences into the field of urban studies.