Temporary population mobilities – including short-term labour, residential and recreational mobilities – have long been a prominent feature of human geography in sparsely populated areas. Such mobilities are often considered from a problem-centric perspective, with both academic and public discourses focusing extensively on the negative impacts that temporary populations have on local communities. Yet, temporary mobilities may also have a range of positive impacts, as they bring new people, ideas, skills, knowledge and network connections to remote communities, and thus potentially contribute to processes of local innovation. This chapter examines how different types of temporary populations contribute to local innovation capacity and new socio-economic development in remote communities. We propose a framework for analysing how different mobile populations with their particular temporal, spatial, motivational and interactional mobility characteristics impact on various forms of community capital, and subsequent innovation outcomes through the mobilisation of such capital. We then apply the framework to review five common examples of temporary mobilities in northern Scandinavia and Outback Australia, ranging from voluntary international lifestyle migrants to displaced refugee migrants, from seasonal second home-owners to short-term transit tourists, and from service to leisure-oriented Indigenous travellers. The review suggests that temporary populations offer substantial potential to boost innovation and new socio-economic development in remote communities, but that communities and institutional structures often fail to recognise and capitalise on such potential.
The development of city regions can be regarded as both a driving force behind and a consequence of increased interaction between firms and people in a region. This paper focuses on people's place attachment to different geographic levels - neighbourhood, residential municipality, and city region - and the relationship between place attachment and mobility. In the present paper, the issues of whether attachment differs between residents in small versus large regions, between the centre and hinterlands, and of whether there is a relationship between attachment and mobility (commuting and migrating) are in focus. The analyses are based on a questionnaire distributed in 2009 to 6000 citizens in the city regions Goteborg and Umea in Sweden. The study shows a relationship between mobility and attachment to the neighbourhood and residential municipality but not with the city region. Satisfaction with the social life in the neighbourhood and public services in the residential municipality were shown to be important for the respondents, place attachment.