Settlement Patterns on the Swedish Countryside in the Emerging Knowledge Society

Abstract

As in other countries, urbanization and industrialization in Sweden was two sides of the same coin. To a large extent, the Swedish urbanization took place at a low level with the emergence of many small towns. The last decades, a redistribution of the urban population to bigger cities has happened. Simultaneously, the real countryside has increased its population around the big and mid-sized cities within commuting distance, but the countryside has also increased its share of the population in a majority of municipalities. Westlund (2002) found that the countryside’s population growth 1990-97 primarily could be explained by income and the size of the local labor market. In this paper, we examine the current trends of population development and extend the possible explanatory variables to among others, some variables measuring local social capital.