The aim of this chapter is to examine the intersection of urban regions and gender, making visible how spaces we call urban regions are affected by and affect gender relations, and how planning initiatives can have an impact on these. We start by introducing the concept of the urban region and how a gender perspective contributes to urban regional analyses. We then turn to issues of gender equality in the planning of urban regions. First, we address issues of regions’ structures and the importance of multi-nuclear regions before turning to everyday life, mobilities and mobilisation as well as environmental issues of sustainability. These attempts to make visible how integrating a gender perspective in planning might improve life for the inhabitants of urban regions are followed by envisioning the caring region as a fruitful path forward.

The development of Nordic gender geography is closely related to societal transformation. The way the gendered labour market is structured and re-structured is a recurrent theme for investigation. In this chapter, we discuss Nordic gender geography since its establishment in the 1980s, with the aim of scrutinising long-term and contemporary trends and challenges. We discern an engagement in issues based on socio-spatial conditions, where agency, identity and intersectional perspectives work together with materiality, institutions and structures. Nordic gender geography thereby contributes with a contextual gender theory, emphasising space as both a designer and an interpreter of gender relations. Regional and local gender relations become a player in the structure-agency relationship, and we argue that socio-spatial gender theorising can modify the idea of universal and all-embracing theoretical explanation of how gender is constructed. Nordic gender geography constitutes a prevailing and growing potential for a significant contribution to gender theory and to socio-spatial analysis of power.

Uppsala universitets första kvinnliga professor utsågs 1949. Gerd Enequist som då tillträdde som professor i kulturgeografi, en nyetablerad professur, kom att bli en viktig person för utvecklingen av den moderna kulturgeografin i Sverige. 

Boken sammanfattar hennes liv utfrån hennes eget arkiv. Där framträder bilden av en hängiven forskare som ville ge sitt bidrag till en bättre förståelse av nutidens samhälle. Bilden visar en samhällsförbättrare, trofast mot sina ideal och vänskapsrelationer och med ett stort personligt engagemang. Men där finns också stråk av svärta som kom att prägla såväl hennes privata som offentliga liv. Boken ger en inblick i den akademiska världen med ämnesstrider och spänningar. 

When thinking of food in the rural north, a wide range of dishes rarely comes to mind. Rural areas are traditionally seen as static, unchanging and homogeneous. The notion of rural identities representing a hegemonic ideal is seen in the ways food culture is understood in rural areas. With increasing rural diversity, it stands to reason that food culture would diversify as well. Food offers an opportunity for integration and to support a wider range of small businesses. Rural migrant entrepreneurship, particularly for women, remains outside the scope of research, however researchers are beginning to challenge this gap. The implications for not recognizing the wide range of food cultures that are present in rural areas may hinder opportunities for migrant entrepreneurship and integration.

In everyday life individuals tend to read place- and time-specific gender codes and act according to, or in contrast to, what they perceive as the appropriate local gender practice. The aim of the article is to address the questions of what happens when people live translocal lives, in multiple cultures, as in international migration situations, and when people change their place of residence with a corresponding changed gender context. Based on in-depth interviews with immigrants, the authors analyse gender navigation in relation to mobility. They focus on the need to navigate between intentions and requirements of various gendered behaviour. By investigating the gendered practices involved in migration, specifically in international migration, they elucidate this navigation as a ‘going-gender’ process which, in turn, visualises the dilemmas involved in these oscillating rather than unidirectional processes. In conclusion, a ‘going-gender’ analysis can explain the way in which individuals learn to handle the intersection of diverse gender contracts through solving the dilemmas when they move between places. Such an analysis would stress the transformative character of ‘doing gender’ and emphasise the reflexive attitude and strategic approach of studied immigrants.

Space plays an important role in construction of space‐specific variations in the condition for women and men. This article presents a way to analyze the way these spatial conditions affect gender relations and practices in rural areas and how, and in what ways, they are reproduced and transformed by using the concept of local gender contract, understood as the unwritten rules that regulate relations between sexes and recreate and reform relations into everyday actions within the framework of the local structures in which they are performed. In rural areas these rules constitute a cornerstone in the construction of gendered rurality.