On ‘village spaces’: An explorative tracing of public space in rural Denmark

The paper enquires into public spaces in villages of rural Denmark. It propounds a curiosity about the spatial conditions of everyday life in villages and their potential important local agency as shared meaningful arenas. As such the inquiry entails focusing on physical-spatial characteristics of these ‘village spaces’, as well as the social and cultural contribution these spaces may offer.
The paper unfolds the ongoing research within the pilot project ‘Landsbyrum’, supported by Danish Landdistriktspuljen. The project encompasses the mapping and analysis of the physical-spatial conditions for everyday life within a study territory in rural Denmark. The initiating assumption is that - in functional terms - important village spaces could be, e.g., the meeting point outside the local sports center or the square in front of the local grocery store, which facilitates formal and informal everyday life practices, thereby becoming nodes in the everyday lives of villagers. In spatial terms, village spaces may have significant traits connected to, e.g., site-specific landscape features, surface and edge characteristics, and the great variety of historically grown morphological structures of Danish villages.
The paper traces conditions and qualities of village spaces through a methodology that is explorative and inquisitive in opening the territory from above (cartographic) and from below (site visits), iterative in its going back and forth between perspectives of territory, village and space and thus inherently multi-scalar as it attempts to link insights across various sections of material and history.
With this empirical tracing as the basis, the paper seeks to contribute discussion of the character and value of village spaces, with two broader spheres of potential impact: to contribute insights into typologies of spaces beyond the urban and suburban condition, and to contribute remedy to a blinkered perspective in the strategizing and planning for the rural territory.