Making place for sustainable welfare in rural settings

Abstract

This article deals with how welfare organisations address challenges to foster public places that are capable of accommodating sustainable development. The overall aim of the study is to increase our understanding of the innovative states of mind among employees in rural welfare organisations, guiding how they forge places for the provision of legitimate sustainable welfare. Data were collected through ethnographic field studies in a public housing company in a rural municipality in southern Sweden. As we investigate the daily making and shaping of place in a rural public housing company, assigned to provide sustainable welfare, we will set out to analyse how employees act to create legitimate forms of sustainable welfare. Our unit of analysis concerns employees’ innovative state of mind as they engage in identifying placemaking activities recognised as able to provide appropriate contributions to sustainable everyday life for the rural population. The results show nuances due to place, forming patterns in the innovative states of mind that guide the property managers’ actions as they create legitimate, sustainable welfare in rural settings. The findings further suggest that placemaking, the daily making and shaping of places, in welfare organisations may sustain existing recognition of rural areas as peripheries or deprioritised places, reproducing a distinction between centre and periphery.