Fróðskaparrit - 01.01.2006, Page 110

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VILLAGE-DWELLING
frames are good. Because this ís also what
modern families look at. It is one of the
criteria... The criteria for settling, what are they?
It is child-care, plots, the school and then the
environment for the children to grow up in. That
is what people look at when they are settling.
He proposes the concept of “modem fami-
lies” - probably as a social opposition to the
traditional family - and thereby builds his
argument on a social change that is now de-
manding a change in municipal policies.
One could say that in the Faroese mainland,
where the municipalities are heavily inter-
twined - both functionally and cognitively
- a high-quality child policy becomes an in-
creasingly important competition-parame-
ter in order to attract young settlers tliat have
ambitions for having children - which
should probably include the vast majority of
the whole population of Faroese youth, even
though there is no quantitative data avail-
able on this.
Another aspect that underpins the fact
that the village is loosing its functional im-
portance on behalf of an aesthetic signifi-
cance, is that functions like shops, service
and employment loose their relevance. If
you have good access to the “space of flows”
(as in Castells, 2000: 404-408), as for in-
stance the main traffic-ore, then you are
functionally integrated to the extended re-
gion if you have access to the relevant “mo-
bility-capital” (Urry, 2004; Kristiansen,
2005) as for instance the car.
When I was interviewing the young peo-
ple settling in “Uppi við Garðagøtu” in
Syðrugøta it struck me that it was not a prob-
lem that their village was virtually emptied
out of functions. There is nothing you can
do in Syðmgøta but being there and enjoy-
ing your neighbourship. One interviewee
mentioned that it would be nice with a little
store around the corner, but that it isn’t re-
ally necessary as they usually buy what they
need in the regional town Runavík.
Functions such as shops, service and em-
ployment have been distanciated from the
dwelling, whereas functions as child-care
and the good local school are still relevant
to be situated in the proximity of the
dwelling-place. What we see is that dis-
tances are becoming a central part of many
peoples’ everyday-life, but that people are
also able to cope with distances technolog-
ically and cognitively. Mobility becomes a
central part of the structural reflexivity of
people as the structures are geographically
extended (Drewes Nielsen, 2005).
I would propose that we try to understand
automobility not only as a mean for getting
from A to B, but also as an extended part of
dwelling. Automobility becomes an every-
day practice, something that is totally rou-
tinized and filled with rituals and repeating
every-day situations. Dwelling is not nec-
essarily a territoral practice but may also be
a mobile practice. One has to understand,
that it is exactly these young people that are
most competent to cope with distances as
they have grown up with driving between
places. Even the current youths’ parents
were used to automobility, as this technol-
ogy became common already during the
70’ies and 80’ies (Kristiansen, 2005: 4, 85-
7). On the other hand, the logic of mobility
must be regarded as a problem for less-nio-
bile people like children or elderly women
that never obtained a drivers-license. These