Changing the region where you live means that life is reorganised in terms of housing, work, leisure and other aspects that affect everyday life. “Beyond the city life. Post-migration experiences of the everyday life for families with young children moving out from a metropolitan area” is a project focusing on the experiences of families who have moved from a metropolitan area to a smaller city or town. The project has been running for a little over a year and is now being filled with families who want to be interviewed by the researchers.
The project looks at how families with young children feel that their everyday life has been affected after moving from a metropolitan area to a smaller city or town. What role does access to services, housing and job opportunities, nature and culture, leisure activities and so on, play in this context?
“We are also looking at how the organisation of everyday life affects the decision to relocate, for example, how you get to and from school and work, if there are opportunities to try out new hobbies, or the proximity to family and friends”, says project manager Ulrika Åkerlund, researcher in Human Geography and active in CRS, the Centre for Research on Sustainable Societal Transformation.
Creating maps and walk-and-talk-interviews
The project has been running for some time and the study is now being filled with respondents, that is, families with young children who want to be interviewed and talk about their everyday life before and after moving from Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö.
“In addition to interviews, we will also ask the families to create a map of their place of residence based on their own experiences. We will also visit the families and let them show us their everyday environment during a walk-and-talk interview. We want to study how the conditions for organising everyday life have changed after the move”, says Fredrik Hoppstadius, human geographer who also does research within the project at CRS.
The project is a four-year research and development project funded by Formas, a government research council for sustainable development, and will run until 2022. In the study, researchers at CRS collaborate with researchers in Human Geography at Umeå University.
More information in Swedish is available at kau.se/livetutanforstorstaden
