While researchers and policy-makers have mainly been interested in larger cities and urban regions, smaller cities have received considerably less attention. With this background in mind, this project focuses on small and medium-sized cities in the Nordic and Arctic contexts.
The first part of the project has addressed different ways of defining and approaching small and medium-sized Nordic cities. One reason for why small and medium-sized cities have been largely neglected by both scholars and policy-makers is a lack of comparative data. With this background in mind, the coming stages of the project will address this challenge, and particularly explore how these types of cities can be studied with grid level statistical data. More specifically, the project will investigate the possibilities of using grid level statistical data for comparatively studying small and medium-sized cities in the Nordic and Arctic regions and thereby to develop a deeper and more nuanced understanding of these types of cities.