Mobility Challenges in the Region of Northern Jutland, Denmark

This paper seeks to investigate the Mobility challenges in the region of Northern Jutland in the tension field between physical and virtual mobility and global and local perspectives. The region of North Jutland is placed in the periphery of the national territory and on top of that large parts of the region can be denoted outskirt rural areas placed within the periphery of the region. This gives the region a number of challenges concerning mobility e.g. the regions large sparsely populated territory makes it difficult to provide sufficient public transport to the residents who also have a large distance between home and work and the possibility for job changes is declining. In this paper we would argue that as opposed to many traditional regional geography approaches or
tourism studies this analysis put focus on the challenges to a peripheral region from the vantage point of an explicit mobilites perspective. Thus in accordance with the mobilities perspective (Urry 2002, Lassen, Jensen 2003, Cresswell 2010) we see that what may be thought of as issues of lack of tourism
infrastructures also relate in a very detailed manner to the internal mobilities potentials of the residents in the region. But more interestingly, the “regional mobility assemblage” is wedded to social practices and everyday life ways of being mobile in the region. In order to understand and ultimately face the challenges facing this region one therefore needs to understand the culture of mobilities as a profound regional feature leading both to including hardware such as airports, road systems and utility provisions and software such as local customs, preferred choices of mode of transport, patterns of social interactions across the region etc. Our claim is thus that at one level of abstraction we need to theorize and think the challenges and potentials of the region in light of a regional mobility assemblage. At the more empirical level we furthermore argue that we need to understand this in the light of the analytical framing model we term the ‘Mobility Challenge’.