Cores and peripheries in a northern periphery: a case study in Finland
Keywords:
Northern Finland, resort tourism, GIS, regional development, core, peripheryAbstract
During the last decades, peripheral rural areas have been faced with social and economic challenges, such as economic restructuring, unemployment, out-migration and ageing population. Due to declining traditional industries, tourism has often been highlighted as a vehicle to revitalize the economy in rural areas. The aim of the review is to conceptualize the regional development process of resorts in relation to their location municipalities at the local level in Finland. GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technology and georeferenced data, so called grid data, are utilized in the statistical socio-economic analysis of the four largest resorts – Levi, Ruka, Saariselkä and Ylläs – in the Finnish periphery. The study results show that the development process of the resorts has been very positive in terms of the indicators of regional development. Along with the absolute progressing, the relative importance of the resorts within their location municipalities has strengthened. The outcome of the study is presented in the classic core–periphery framework: the resorts are considered as cores and the surrounding area of those cores as a periphery. In consequence, there emerges a polarization process within the municipalities under study because of tourism development. It is obvious that the role of the resorts within the location municipalities in regional development will strengthen in the future. Generally speaking, from the viewpoint of the regional development of peripheral rural areas, the main challenge is to extend the positive socio-economic impacts of resorts, cores, to a wider geographical area, a periphery.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with Fennia agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license of the published metadata is Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0).
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a doctoral dissertation or book compilation), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
.png)



