Experiencing place-change:A shared sense of loss after closure of village facilities

Rural communities often display strong emotions in response to closures of facilities and services. Research into explaining community responses hardly pays attention to the socio-psychological process of 'loss' of such local facilities, which occurs when place bonds are disrupted. This paper explores how a rural community makes sense of place-change by examining how residents interpret, evaluate and cope with local facility-decline. Three focus group discussions were conducted in Tzummarum, a village in the Netherlands, just after the closure of a local sports hall was announced. A theoretical framework for community coping-responses is used to interpret the empirical results. We find that while the closure of local facilities can result in a disruption of individual place bonds, there is a discernible shared sense of loss based on the social and symbolical meaning that certain facilities have for the village community. This sense of loss can help explain collective coping responses. However, this study found that collective action is only considered for local facilities that foster a sense of community, provided there is enough collective efficacy

Dealing with the loss of the village supermarket:The perceived effects two years after closure

In 2015, the local supermarket of the depopulating village of Ulrum closed its doors. After a first survey around the closure, a second survey was conducted two years later, to investigate changes in the different meanings of the local supermarket and the perceived effects of its closure over time. The results show that respondents state that the liveability and status of the village have decreased because of the loss of the supermarket. This strongly relates to the symbolic and village level meanings of the supermarket: A village ‘needs’ a supermarket for the villages’ status and as a place to do groceries, and people feel that a village without a supermarket is a village without a heart. The article concludes by alleging that the symbolic meaning of facilities plays an important role in explaining the perceived effects of the loss of the local supermarket

Destination Branding by Residents:The Role of Perceived Responsibility in Positive and Negative Word-of-Mouth

The importance of residents’ communication about their home region as tourist destination is increasingly acknowledged in the place branding process. However, the extent to which residents feel responsible for communicating Destination Images (DIs), and how these attributions affect word-of-mouth (WOM) behavior has remained unclear. This paper addresses this topic by reporting a quantitative study (N = 913) among residents of the Dutch province of Fryslân. The results show that responsibility attributions for communicating positive regional images predict, next to Place Attachment and DI, positive and negative WOM behavior (pWOM and nWOM). Particularly attributing responsibility to citizens themselves is a significant predictor of pWOM and nWOM. Further, findings point to the role of age in variation in responsibility attributions and to previous holiday experience as predictor of nWOM. The implications for citizen engagement in destination branding and regional tourism management are discussed

Physical and Social Engineering in the Dutch Polders:The Case of the Noordoostpolder

This chapter provides an overview of the Zuiderzee project and describes the design and development of the Noordoostpolder. It focuses on the design and development of the Noordoostpolder. Planning projects such as the Zuiderzee project fitted very well into the international Zeitgeist of the interwar period. The reclamation of the Zuiderzee became an object of national pride, attractive to the whole nation and a useful symbol of the Dutch national identity. In the 1960s and 1970s, following sociocultural changes in Dutch society, the selection procedures were criticised more strongly and, in the polders of Oostelijk Flevoland and Zuidelijk Flevoland, they were applied much less strictly. The plans for and implementation of the partial reclamation of the Zuiderzee coincided with the development of the social sciences in the Netherlands. The physical and social planning of the Noordoostpolder reached new heights after 1945. Engineers, architects, spatial planners and social scientists became involved in the development of this polder

Rural Geography Revisited:Op zoek naar de geografie in het platteland

Oratie uitgesproken door prof.dr. Tialda Haartsen op 22 april 2022 bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Rurale Geografie aan de Faculteit Ruimtelijke Wetenschappen Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.In haar inaugurele rede gaat Haartsen in op hoe beleid beter kan worden afgestemd op de behoeften en realiteiten van het platteland.Het Europese platteland maakt zich op voor een groot aantal ontwikkelingen, zoals de energietransitie, transities in de landbouw, klimaatverandering, toenemende ruimtelijke ongelijkheid, de geopolitieke en economische gevolgen van de oorlog in Oekraïne, en dit alles in een context van een vergrijzende en afnemende bevolking. Deze transities zullen de hedendaagse verhoudingen tussen globaal en lokaal, tussen centrum en periferie en tussen stad en platteland behoorlijk op de kop gaan zetten. Met alle gevolgen van dien voor de ruimtelijke inrichting van het platteland.<br/

Who is afraid of population decline? The Struggle of Keeping Rural Depopulation on the Dutch Agenda

The Netherlands is a small, highly urbanised and densely populated country. The distances are short and levels of welfare high. Throughout the 80s and 90s, people were generally satisfied with service levels in rural areas and experienced the rural areas’ quality of life as high. Around 2006, however, the population started to decline in several rural regions. The government responded with the development of two national Action Plans for Population Decline. This paper analyses the national action plans, their content and implementation. It looks into the problem definition and assignment of responsibility, their success in addressing population decline problems, and in keeping depopulation on the political agenda. The paper concludes with some reflections on what we can learn about population decline and related policies based on the experiences in a highly urbanised country like the Netherlands

The time and place of social mixing:Everyday rhythms of long-term residents and newcomers in a Dutch neighborhood

Despite research questioning the beneficial effects of social mixing interventions, urban governments continue to strive for a social mix. In this paper we examine the effects of social mixing through the concept of rhythm. We paint an ethnographic portrait of a disadvantaged area in the city of Groningen, The Netherlands, which was targeted by a social mixing intervention. We analyze everyday rhythms of newcomers and long-term low-income residents in order to shed light on the effects of the mixing intervention on perceptions of social division and disadvantage. By introducing ‘exemplary’ newcomers, the social mixing intervention improves the area in terms of e.g. livability scores and socio-economic indicators. However, looking through the lens of rhythm, we found how social divisions between advantaged and disadvantaged groups become exacerbated as a result of ‘arrhythmias’ occurring. We argue that institutional actors fail to align the social mixing intervention with long-term residents’ daily rhythms, which impinges upon that group’s right to the social production of their neighborhood. On a wider scale, we assert the social mixing intervention renders the problem of socio-economic disadvantage spatially insignificant under the guise of improved livability. Therefore, we implore future urban policy to explicitly imagine the ways in which socio-spatial interventions might affect daily rhythms of inequality within neighborhoods