Department of Human Geography

The transformations of the croft: Materiality, representation and practice from 1850 to 2010

The concept of the croft (Sw. torp) is complex. From the 17th century crofts were small tenant holdings on a farm or estate. Along with changes in society since c. 1850, they were converted into freehold farms, second homes or left to ruins. They acquired new functional, social and symbolic values and today the croft is mostly associated with a rural idyll. The aim of the thesis is to study the transformations of the croft since1850 in order to understand how and why it has survived as a place and acquired the meanings it has. Thus the construction of place is in centre of attention. This process is approached from three angles: the materiality of the croft, ideas and representations of it and various practices relating to it. This is studied through historical documents and maps, text analysis and interviews, in part through three case studies in Uppland, Småland and Värmland. The main conclusions are that great changes notwithstanding, there are continuities in all three dimensions of the croft. This combination of inertia and change is central to how and why the croft has survived. The study also shows the importance of timing between available rural dwellings and a demand for such dwellings. Another conclusion is that the idealisation of the croft is old and not only a present day phenomena. Further, the different dimensions of the croft and the relations which can be found between them have been important for the transformation and survival of the croft. The materiality, immateriality and practices of the croft in the past remain parts of what constitutes it today, together with those dimensions in the present. The study shows the possibilities inherent in focusing on the intertwining of various dimensions and periods of time for the understanding of the processes of place construction.

keywords: Crofts, place construction, materiality, representation, practices, historical geography, Sweden, second homes, idealisation, timing

Along with urbanization and modernization the usage of second homes has increased in Sweden and elsewhere. This presentation deals with a specific kind of second home i.e. cottages that until early 20th century were small tenant holdings on large estates and inhabited by the Swedish rural poor. Based on interviews of cottage users, the presentation revolves around the use of these dwellings and how they influence their users. For example, they provide continuity. These cottages are often kept within the family for longer times than ordinary residences. They also contain continuity because of their history as homes in the past. The cottages may be immobile places, but they offer their users a place with time depth and thus chances to travel in history while being in the present. Further, the harsh past of earlier users seems to add meaning to the present day lives there and the typical material structures of the cottages influence practices there. Much effort is put into decorating the cottages correct and preserving old characteristics. The materiality of the cottage has also made users adapt to a more simple and un-modern way of living. So, at the same time as society is becoming more high-tech, mobile and modern, these dwellings are kept very simple and seemingly unchanged. They are valued for being the opposite of the fast changing urban and modern society, a process that however is the very basis for the possibility of spending all that time and money that people do at the cottage.

During the last 150 years the countryside has transformed due to urbanisation, industrialisation, changes in agriculture, an increase in welfare and more. Once common homes for the poor rural small-scale farmers and workers, rural cottages and smallholdings plotted over the countryside has also undergone large changes. They are today often seen and used as places of rural idyll, certainly a quite radical transformation considering their previous character and usage. By discussing past and contemporary situations of old rural cottages, as well as the representations of them, in foremost Ireland and Sweden this presentation deals with these altered places and asks how the transformations and idealizations has occurred and touches upon possible consequences of those changes. A conclusion that can be made is that these small cottages, once simple and sometimes even abandoned homes of the rural poor, have been undergoing both material and symbolical changes. One part of this is that they during the last century and up till today often have been portrayed and seen as idyllic decent homes connected to an idealized and selective past and countryside but also as a part of an national identity. As for similarities and differences between Ireland and Sweden there are quite different political and economical contexts and processes that have affected the material and symbolical practices and changes connected to these small cottages, but similarities can also be distinguished and will be discussed.

In Sweden the term croft (Sw. torp) has a dual meaning. Today it is often seen as a rural Swedish summer idyll used for second home usage. However, from the 17th century and onwards into the 20th crofts were livelihoods and homes for the rural landless. Crofts were then small, poor tenant holdings (like small farms) on someone else’s land. This presentation will revolve around the present day use of these places. The croft, as a place of history and heritage as well as of present day use, is today to a great extent dependent on their users’ ideas of how crofts should be and on their practices in connection to this. Thus, it is essential to investigate how the users make use of, understand and value crofts, with all their history, today. Interviews with present day users have been conducted and they indicate that the interest and thoughts of the croft and its history, and of those who lived there, often has been trigged and developed by being on a croft and practicing life and work there and seeing all the marks in the landscape. It is clear that most of the users weren’t really interested in crofts and their history before using the site, before being in place. Something that seems to fascinate the users a lot was the contrasts between the modern life on the croft and life there in the past. Also the users seemed to highlight a more realistic, historical and practice-based understanding of crofts than what can be seen in media where crofts often are represented as prefect, and typically Swedish, second homes. The users were often stating that representations of crofts in media are idealised and even incorrect and thus that their own understandings of them were more true.

Torsten Hägerstrand har påpekat att människan lever i två olika men sammanhängande verkligheter. Den ena består av mönster av mening, den andra av den materiella verkligheten (Hägerstrand 1991: 197). Trots att många troligtvis kan hålla med om det brukar antingen det ena eller det andra ges företräde vid val av forskningsobjekt och förklaringar.

Summary: The crofts are dead. Long live the crofts! The local heritage movement’s commitment to crofts in post-war Sweden

During the post-war area, Sweden’s crofts,
which, ever since the second half of the 19th
century, had been increasingly regarded as an
outmoded form of small farming and had been
vacated by their tenants in favour of jobs in the
expanding towns and cities and industries, began
to attract interest outside the agricultural
sector, e.g. within the local heritage movement.
This article sets out to investigate the great interest
shown in crofts by the local heritage movement
since the 1960s and to place that interest
in a societal context, with a view to understanding
what made it possible for crofts to become
one of the movement’s flagships. Special attention
is paid to the significance of the material
qualities of crofts in this connection. Through
a study, influenced by discourse analysis, of
both croft inventories by local heritage societies
and of documents from the movement’s central
agencies, the article discusses the manifestations
assumed by involvement with crofts, what that
involvement is based on and what consequences
it may have had.
One conclusion drawn is that the croft-related
activity of the local heritage movement has
been informed by a notion of good crofters and
bad crofts. Crofts were the homes of industrious
people who, in the sweat of their brows and
by dint of deprivation, built up the Swedish welfare
state, and this inspired the movement with
feelings of respect and pride. For this reason
crofts became important to observe and preserve, both cognitively and materially speaking,
Involvement with crofts, as manifested by all the
hundreds of inventory texts which have been
produced, has resulted in certain values and
properties becoming embedded or accentuated
in the crofts. With the passing of time, interest
in crofts has become naturalised: one must take
an interest in them, and they must be preserved.
The fact of many crofts having vanished made
them all the more important to highlight. The
movement’s commitment has focused on documenting
and making visible the physical aspect
of the existence of crofts, and the lessons to be
learned from personal experiences of croft environments
are frequently highlighted. Through
the inventories and visits to croft sites, a journey
through time could begin, offering chances of
experiencing other periods of history and bearing
those experiences with one back to presentday
society.
The analysis points the importance of the
link between the spirit of the post-war age, with
the labour movement’s harvest time and material
prosperity and welfare in Sweden on the
one hand, and dedication to the crofts, these
dwelling places closely bound up with material
poverty, plain living and decay, on the other.
Interest in crofts can be seen as part of an increased
popular interest in the cultural heritage.
If, though, we take as our starting point which
people initiated, controlled and carried out the
croft inventories, this worm’s eye perspective
becomes a retrospect which above all emanated
from a top-down, externalising perspective on
crofters’ lives.

Key words: Crofts, local heritage associations, materiality, time travelling, representations, historic documentation, post-war Sweden

A second home is often, for the owner and his/her family, an important place. It is a place for meeting family and friends, relaxation and creativity. However, it can also be a place for conflicts, agonizing meetings and diverse, and conflicting, desires, needs and values. The sense of place, identity and continuity, and the economic and functional values that second homes might carry makes them potentially problematic when users change or increase and when they are used and managed in common. In the Nordic countries, second homes are often kept within the family. This can make the amount of users, and thus the pressure of time, space and resources, per second home increase as generations change and expand. The second home owners have, in average, been older the last 20 years. Problematic issues connected to generational changes and shared usage and ownership is a phenomenon that today seems therefore to be growing. Many people experience these conflicts as full of guilt and created by difficult relatives. However, this is a question of larger societal significance. These conflicts are very spatial, rooted in issues of shared usage/ownership of space in combination with the powerful meanings linked to second homes as places.  This presentation deals with second homes and the problems that can be triggered by generational changes and shared usage/ownership of them. Furthermore, it explores consequences if this, such as various strategies of municipality planning authorities and families as ways of dealing with possibly increased pressure and conflicts on second homes.

Along with urbanisation and modernisation, the use of second homes has increased in the Western world. This can be seen as part of the increasing mobility of people in society, but also as part of a search for stillness and escape from modern urban society. Recently, scholars in geography and other disciplines have argued that mobility and fixity are two sides of the same coin. This paper aims to explore the complex, manifold and often paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility in practices of dwelling and seeking stillness in a highly mobile society. It elaborates on how mobility and stillness, in both space and time, are intertwined and mutually influence each other by analysing second home usage of old cottages that formally were dwelling houses of poor tenant smallholdings in Sweden. How do mobility and stillness exist and interact at these cottages and what parts do the cottages themselves have in this? This is studied through interviews with cottage users regarding their daily life practices and encounters with history and materiality at the cottages. These cottages are easily thought of as places of immobility where time has stood still. However, the paper shows that these cottages are places that continuously emerge through entanglements of mobility and stillness and of present and past times. The practices and experiences of mobility and stillness at the cottage are much integrated in and directed by the cottages’ specific geography, history and materiality, and the activities and thinking of their users because of these characteristics. The users go to the cottage to be at a place where they, with the help of the preserved materiality and history of the cottages, can feel rooted and still. At the same time the cottages offer imaginary time travels and experiences of other times and lifestyles.

Second-homes are vital parts of the encountering of the rural in the Western World. The way they are perceived in society is important to explore as it can influence how and by whom this part of the rural is used. This paper explores the media construction of a specific type of second-homes in Sweden; cottages that since the 1950s have transformed from poor smallholdings to beloved second-homes. Besides being lived spaces, these cottages have become well known features of rural Sweden, symbols of national identity and described by media as rural idylls. They can be seen as having a cultural centrality in the revaluation of rurality and the shift towards post-productivist countryside in Sweden. But how could this type of humble cottage become so significant and what does the image of it really imply? This is studied through a discourse analysis of the representation of these cottages in a monthly home magazine from 1956 to 2008 with a particular interest in the production and naturalisation of them as important rural artefacts and national symbols. The paper discusses how material and immaterial dimensions have interacted in this construction process as well as possible social implications of the representations. Conclusively, the representations construct a restricted image of cottages and their users and of why cottages are important and should be taken care of. These representations are building on values, ideas and norms embedded in a highlighted and particular materiality which makes these seem innocent, natural and common sense. By exploring this the paper contributes to the wider inquiry into the discursive construction of the rural where seemingly innocent and natural ways of representing places, people and artefacts can produce strong and excluding norms and values regarding the rural and its users and uses.

Landscape approaches have gained importance in heritage management in recent years. Likewise, in the Republic of Ireland, the geographical focus of this presentation, landscapes are often referred to as cornerstones of the national heritage. However, heritage management isn’t what it used to be in Ireland. In 2008, Ireland entered a severe economical crisis as part of the global financial crisis. Since then, there have been heavy cuts in state spending on health, welfare, education and also heritage, an area that has suffered relatively large cuts. These changing circumstances have meant shifts in focus, valuing and ways of working within state heritage management. There is less funding for national and local heritage projects, in particular of they don’t provide employment, tourism or concern emergency works on individual structures at risk. What does this mean for a landscape perspective on heritage? This presentation explores how management and valuing of heritage has been affected by the economic crisis in Ireland since 2008. In particular, the emphasis is to sketch and discuss the influence of the crisis and its aftermath on the management of heritage landscapes versus objects and to highlight the effects of the crisis on different landscapes and part of landscapes.

It has been stated that heritage practices are part of the design of the future. Today’s decisions and conceptualisations regarding heritage matter, they shape the world we live in today and onwards. In 2008, Ireland entered a severe financial crisis as part of the global economic crisis. Since then, it has seen large raises in income taxes and cuts in state spending on health, welfare, education and also heritage, an area which has suffered relatively large cuts. This implies needs for rethinking choices and prioritisations to cope with changing circumstances. New ways of dealing with heritage may arise. Ideas regarding heritage in society are materialised in space through heritage practices like utilisation, conservation and state support. As such the ways society deal with what is recognised as heritage and questions of what/whose pasts are worth saving, how this should be used and valued and why, influence present and future beings of heritage places. This presentation addresses how the economic crisis in Ireland has affected the ways heritage has been dealt with, conceptually and practically, in state heritage work but also in the voluntary sector, which has expanded during the crisis. Through analysis of documents and interviews with state employees and volunteers, local and national responses to the crisis are explored. It shows how the crisis, with increasing uncertainty and competition within the state regarding relevance and support, creates a situation where certain sites, ways of conceptualising heritage and its values and ways of working become accentuated while others loose ground.

In 2008, the Republic of Ireland entered a severe financial crisis partly as a part of the global economic crisis. Since then, it has seen large raises in income taxes and cuts in state spending on health, welfare, education and on heritage, which has suffered relatively large cuts. This implies a need for rethinking choices and prioritisations to cope with the changing circumstances. Across Europe, the effects of the crisis on heritage, or the whole cultural sector, have yet mostly been highlighted in general or supposed terms rather than empirically analysed. But what actually happens to how heritage is conceptualised in times of crisis? Inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis, this paper explores representation of and argumentation for heritage in Irish state heritage policies pre and post the recession 2008. Much concerns regarding heritage management are discursively shaped. Policies, stating the authorised viewpoint, are thus key in the construction of heritage and its values in society. Recently, research has highlighted a shift towards more instrumentality in cultural policy due to wider societal changes. A crisis could influence such development. The analysis departs from an often-stated notion of heritage as a part of the Irish national recovery, but what does that imply? Focus is therefore put on how different representations of heritage and its values are present, argued for and compete in a situation with increasing competition regarding relevance and support. The paper shows how heritage matters are refocused, streamlined and packaged as productive, good-for-all, unproblematic and decomplexified in order to be perceived and valued as part of the national recovery. This includes privileging certain instrumental values, foremost economic, by means of specificity, space and quantification, while heritage’s contribution to social life, education or health, although often mentioned, are downplayed by being expressed in much more vague terms.