Tarjei Hanken
Doctoral research fellow at Nord University
I am a PhD candidate in the Urbanities research group (URBINN) at Nord University. I have a master’s diploma in Sociology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. My previous research has focused on neighbourhoods, city centres, and how people make sense of their environments. In my PhD project, I research the process of urbanisation in northern Norway. My research interests lie in urbanism, placemaking, and cities, using a sociological approach.
Tell us about your project!
In my project, I will research how urban development in northern Norway has been shaped by discourses found in governmental papers, issue-expert reports and planning documents. While cities and urban centres in the Arctic are rapidly growing, many smaller surrounding communities face stagnation or population decline. This development can be explained by varying resource and investment opportunities available to these places. Early policy documents emphasised centralisation and finding ways to move people toward urban centres. Later documents shifted focus to encouraging people to live in “all of Norway,” highlighting the changing geo-political situation, opportunities afforded by the digitalisation of the workplace, and modern communication technologies as key points for drawing people back to the districts. The project combines a practice-oriented document analysis with a case study of a municipality, with an aim to understand how these shifts in discourse have influenced urban development and decision-making in the North.
“ In my project, I will research how urban development in northern Norway has been shaped by discourses found in governmental papers, issue-expert reports and planning documents”
— Tarjei Hanken on his research project “Condemned communities”