Futureless futures: Reflections on life in doomed places in Nordic countries

Abstract

Across the scholarly and journalistic literature, an increasing sense of future uncertainty and prevailing sense of dread is being narrated. This unsettling sense of futurelessness seems to cut across scales in that globally unfolding menaces also shape lived experience locally in specific sites, where global risks intersect with local hazardousness of place. In this chapter, we reflect on how a set of communities facing different kinds of threatened futures have engaged with their predicament. Our cases are Lyngen in the Norwegian Arctic and Falsterbo and Kiruna in Sweden. Engaging these cases, we probe the complexities of decisions on planned relocation or staying in place. We also explore ideas on how living with the knowledge of a threatened future impacts senses of existential security and everyday life in the present, where literature on doom, slow calamity and futurelessness is also emerging. We take as our point of departure that capacities and vulnerabilities exist alongside one another in populations. This chapter concerns the insights that potentially futureless places can teach us about capacities to endure, and forms of existential insecurity in the face of doom.