Resurgent back-to-the-land and the cultivation of a renewed countryside

In connection to concerns about, for example, climate change, peak oil, pandemics and the depopulation of many rural areas, there has been a counter-migration from urban to rural areas in past decades. An important part of this counter-migration is the so-called 'back-to-the-land' migration of former urban residents who move to rural areas and adopt primarily agrarian lifestyles. Through a review of 48 migration letters in which migrants write about their experiences of moving from urban to rural areas to commence agriculture, this article explores the underlying ideals and agricultural practices of the back-to-land phenomena and discusses what significance this form of agricultural migration may have for understanding broader sustainability transformations and contemporary rural change. Important questions concern: What kinds of motives, practices and ideals underpin back-to-the-land migration? What relevance does "back-to-the-land" have for how we comprehend rurality and how the current food landscape is changing? Based on the letter reviews, this article illuminates four interconnected themes with regard to back-to-the-landers practices and ideals. Back-to-the-land as (i) rebelling against payroll work and meaningless lives in the cities, (ii) reinvention and retrotopia, (iii) reconnecting with nature and cultivating resilient alternatives and (iv) resistance and silent revolution. The article argues that the current back-to-land migration contributes to the construction of a renewed rurality-a reinvented form of rurality-that are adapted to suit both present and future needs in a world that is perceived as becoming more unruly. The article further suggests that, although back-to-the-land migration may not yet have any significant material implications on the current food system, the ideals and practices the back-to-the-landers profess, provide an important imaginary of how we can comprehend an alternative 'rurality' that reconnect people, land and food in more sustainable ways, through, for example, benign ways of practising agriculture and organising the food system. In this light, the current back-to-the-land phenomena can be seen as a particular form of sustainability migration of voluntary peasantry that is based on retrotopian ideals of a rural past that is paired with progressive sustainability practices of the present

Building Biospheres Reserves through Collaborative Governance : a study of organisational forms and collaborative processes in Sweden’s biosphere reserves

In June 2019, Sweden received its seventh biosphere reserve. Biosphere reserves are part of UNESCO’s global programme Man and the Biosphere (MAB), which commenced in 1971 with the aim of enhancing the relationship between humans and the environment. There are more than 700 biosphere reserves in the world that strive to be model areas for sustainable societal development. In total, Sweden’s biosphere reserves account for about seven per cent of the country’s total surface area. The report describes the development that has taken place in Sweden’s biosphere reserves regarding their organisational structures and their formation processes. The report is based on semi-structured interviews and conversations with about 60 key informants in combination with extensive analysis of documents. Based on the biosphere reserves’ mission to promote collaboration and dialogue for sustainable societal development, the report describes the challenges and success factors that have emerged since their establishment and discusses these in relation to issues concerning organisational change, representativeness, legitimacy and organisational effects. The report shows that the biosphere reserves are characterised by extensive collaboration among different stakeholders and organisations, but run the risk of mission drift due to their hybrid organisational character and their interactive working methods. The report also reveals several significant qualitative results of the biosphere reserves’ organisational processes. In several of the biosphere reserves, people have started to perceive and relate to their environments in new ways as a result of the work. The collaborative work processes have also contributed to resolving several natural resourcerelated conflicts. Finally, the report provides recommendations for supporting the work with biosphere reserves in Sweden

Saving, sharing and shaping landrace seeds in commons:unravelling seed commoning norms for furthering agrobiodiversity

One of the major challenges facing agricultural and food systems today is the loss of agrobiodiversity. Considering the current impasse of preventing the worldwide loss of crop diversity, this paper highlights the possibility for a radical reorientation of current legal seed frameworks that could provide more space for alternative seed systems to evolve which centre on norms that support on-farm agrobiodiversity. Understanding the underlying norms that shape seed commons are important, since norms both delimit and contribute to what ultimately will constitute the seeds and who will ultimately have access to the seeds and thus to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported. This paper applies a commoning approach to explore the underpinning norms of a Swedish seed commons initiative and discusses the potential for furthering agrobiodiversity in the context of wider legal and authoritative discourses on seed enclosure. The paper shows how the seed commoning system is shaped and protected by a particular set of farming norms, which allows for sharing seeds among those who adhere to the norms but excludes those who will not. The paper further illustrates how farmers have been able to navigate fragile legal and economic pathways to collectively organize around landrace seeds, which function as an epistemic farming community, that maintain landraces from the past and shape new landraces for the present, adapted to diverse agro-ecological environments for low-input agriculture. The paper reveals how the ascribed norms to the seed commons in combination with the current seed laws set a certain limit to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported and discusses why prescriptions of “getting institutions right” for seed governance are difficult at best, when considering the shifting socio-nature of seeds. To further increase agrobiodiversity, the paper suggests future seed laws are redirected to the sustenance of a proliferation of protected seed commoning systems that can supply locally adapted plant material for diverse groups of farmers and farming systems.</p

Saving, sharing and shaping landrace seeds in commons:unravelling seed commoning norms for furthering agrobiodiversity

One of the major challenges facing agricultural and food systems today is the loss of agrobiodiversity. Considering the current impasse of preventing the worldwide loss of crop diversity, this paper highlights the possibility for a radical reorientation of current legal seed frameworks that could provide more space for alternative seed systems to evolve which centre on norms that support on-farm agrobiodiversity. Understanding the underlying norms that shape seed commons are important, since norms both delimit and contribute to what ultimately will constitute the seeds and who will ultimately have access to the seeds and thus to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported. This paper applies a commoning approach to explore the underpinning norms of a Swedish seed commons initiative and discusses the potential for furthering agrobiodiversity in the context of wider legal and authoritative discourses on seed enclosure. The paper shows how the seed commoning system is shaped and protected by a particular set of farming norms, which allows for sharing seeds among those who adhere to the norms but excludes those who will not. The paper further illustrates how farmers have been able to navigate fragile legal and economic pathways to collectively organize around landrace seeds, which function as an epistemic farming community, that maintain landraces from the past and shape new landraces for the present, adapted to diverse agro-ecological environments for low-input agriculture. The paper reveals how the ascribed norms to the seed commons in combination with the current seed laws set a certain limit to the extent to which agrobiodiversity is upheld and supported and discusses why prescriptions of “getting institutions right” for seed governance are difficult at best, when considering the shifting socio-nature of seeds. To further increase agrobiodiversity, the paper suggests future seed laws are redirected to the sustenance of a proliferation of protected seed commoning systems that can supply locally adapted plant material for diverse groups of farmers and farming systems.</p

Reinventing the commons

The thesis explores the emergence of local natural resource management arrangements as a contextual and negotiated process in two rural communities in northern Sweden: Ammarnäs and Coastal Ring. It analyses particular practices and meanings that appear in the struggles to develop local management arrangements and discusses the observations made in relation to dominant theories in natural resource management. By exploring the emergence of local natural resource management arrangements in a contemporary situation and as a contextual and negotiated process the study seeks to contribute to the debates on how local institutional arrangements for the management of common pool resources emerge. The research design is qualitative, based on interviews and participant observation. Theoretically, the study is grounded in a social constructionist perspective on institutional theory in which institutionalisation processes are conceived of as processes of gaining legitimacy and the construction of shared understandings. The thesis also draws on discourse theory and presents and reflects upon the dominant theoretical approaches to natural resource management. The results reveal that the emergence of local management arrangements was sparked by a combination of interrelated factors, such as contemporary and historical state interventions in resource management, conflicts over natural resources and through international and national policies on natural resource management. The study elucidates how particular meanings and practices were ascribed to local management. People constructed local management discursively by giving legitimacy to local management through a process of reinvention, where narratives from past natural resource management experiences were drawn on and adapted for needs in the present. The struggle to develop local management arrangements also influenced social relations and people’s identification with the surrounding environment as well as people’s constructions of identities vis-a-vis each other. The study raises questions about the predictability of institutional design based on theories emphasising economic rational choice. The analysis suggests that in order to enhance the understanding of how local management arrangements over natural resources emerge, we need to move beyond descriptions of principles of how systems of common pool resources at the local level are best designed and also examine the emergent properties that appear when local management arrangements are negotiated. The thesis argues that understandings are required that reflect the socially and historically embedded nature of local management arrangements to more fully understand some of the complexity that unfolds when people organise to take increased management responsibility over adjacent natural resources

Molecular Optimization Using Graph-to-Graph Translation

Drug development is a protracted and expensive process. One of the main challenges indrug discovery is to find molecules with desirable properties. Molecular optimization is thetask of optimizing precursor molecules by affording them with desirable properties. Recentadvancement in Artificial Intelligence, has led to deep learning models designed for molecularoptimization. These models, that generates new molecules with desirable properties, have thepotential to accelerate the drug discovery. In this thesis, I evaluate the current state-of-the-art graph-to-graph translation model formolecular optimization, the HierG2G. I examine the HierG2G’s performance using three testcases, where the second test is designed, with the help of chemical experts, to represent a commonmolecular optimization task. The third test case, tests the HierG2G’s performance on,for the model, previously unseen molecules. I conclude that, in each of the test cases, the HierG2Gcan successfully generate structurally similar molecules with desirable properties givena source molecule and an user-specified desired property change. Further, I benchmark the HierG2Gagainst two famous string-based models, the seq2seq and the Transformer. My resultsuggests that the seq2seq is the overall best model for molecular optimization, but due to thevarying performance among the models, I encourage a potential user to simultaneously use allthree models for molecular optimization

Children’s space in a city undergoing densification : A study of open space per child on preschools in the urban locality of Umeå

This study aims to describe and analyze changes over time in the degree of relative crowding in preschools within the urban area of a medium-sized city in the northern part of Sweden – and does so by examining the size of the available open space per child. Further, this work explores the spatial variation of open space dimensioning in relation to the urban center in order to decide whether shrinking of children’s open space should be considered to be limited to the major metropolitan areas of Sweden. With the basis in an assumption of increasing competition over land as a consequence of neoliberal governance and densification as strategies to promote urban growth, it’s hypothesized from recent literature that these ambitions increasingly risk confining children’s right to adequate areas of open space for outdoor play. Using a combination of quantitative approaches of analysis, with the use of regression analysis the study concluded that the coefficient of the independent variable Building age is positive, and therefore matches the expected direction. However, no statistically significant linear relationship was observed even with the use of relevant variables – highlighting a complex relationship surrounding the understanding and prediction of land use in general and urban open space in particular. A comparison of mean values using grouping based on both the aspect of time and centrality found that preschools built after 1998 generally contains 0,85 m2 larger open space per child than those built before 1987, whereas preschools within the urban center had 6,18 m2 larger open space per child than those located in more peripheral locations. When controlling for the share of preschools that undercuts and exceeds the recommendations related to dimensioning of open space communicated by the Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, units within the city center was found to meet these recommendations to a greater extent. Preschools built after 1998 seem to be more prevalent among units that undercuts the said recommendations. The results call for further research within this field of study in order to determine whether or not children’s shrinking open space can be limited to be a phenomenon encompassing solely major metropolitan areas.

E-commerce in mobilapplications : A study about conditions for e-commerce inside an mobilapplication

Syftet med denna studie är att ta reda på vilka förutsättningar som krävs för att en mobil e-handelsapplikation ska bli populär och adopteras av många. Detta för att hjälpa de företag som planerar att införskaffa sig mobila e-handelsapplikationer att få den mer attraktiv.  Internet och e-handel har växt sedan en lång tid tillbaka. De flesta personerna i Sverige har en smartphone och även internet till den. Detta leder till att personer som innehar en smartphone har tillgång till internet överallt. Mobilapplikationer utvecklas för smartphones för att underlätta vissa aktiviteter och att ha en direkt uppkoppling mot det företaget som innehar applikationen. Det finns fler applikationer än endast de som är till för företag exempel på detta kan vara spel och dejtingapplikationer. Denna uppsats fokuserar på e-handel inom mobila applikationer och varför det inte har blivit större än vad det är. Denna studie kommer fokusera på att ha ett kvalitativt tillvägagångssätt när det kommer till att undersöka ämnet. Intervjuerna i denna studie har utförts med företag som har tidigare erfarenhet inom utveckling av mobilapplikationer och främst e-handelsmobilapplikationer. I USA används e-handel inom mobila applikationer dubbelt så mycket än vad det gör i Sverige. Hur detta kommer sig har framgått i denna studie vara på grund av främst tre orsaker: Betalningssätt, användarcentrerad systemutveckling och marknadsföring