Fragile communities finding strength from the inside
Discover Dalir, Iceland, where co-creation has breathed new life into the community focusing on involving diverse social groups.
A town that tourists pass by
Búðardalur, a small town in Western Iceland's Dalir region, is often overlooked by tourists. The nature is, albeit wonderful with green hills dotted by sheep and tiny waterfalls, not as breathtaking as further up North. As such, the town meets tourists, Iceland’s main source of revenue, mainly as they make a brief stop to stock up on snacks and gas. The situation has pressed such a heavy mark on Búðardalur that the town’s only grocery store offers snacks instead of groceries for a steep price. Despite political efforts, the grocery store chain has refused to serve the needs of local people, leading many to boycott the store and drive for over an hour to the next town instead.
The “Fragile Communities” project
The Icelandic Regional Development Institute (IRDI) launched the Fragile Communities project in 2012. Since then, the project has reached out to remote municipalities that face challenges with people leaving the area and the ageing of those who stay. Many of these communities focus on developing tourism to replace traditional agriculture and fishing industries. The official goal of the Fragile Communities project is to stop the municipalities from declining: as an aim this is very ambitious and would require much more public funding to be feasible. In any case, there is plenty of rewarding work to be done to improve the well-being of local people, even in a situation where the population growth cure cannot be turned upwards.
A municipality taking part in the project can access some smaller national project funds more readily, making it possible to invest more in local needs such as infrastructure, broadband services, and roads or experiment with new practices in organising transport for high school students, for example. In addition to funding, a lot of practical work under the Fragile Communities project is done in citizen panels with the aim of increasing a sense of advocacy and empowerment in local people.
In 2014, Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine. Picture: Unsplash
Unique challenges of Icelandic remote regions
Tourism is a volatile and unevenly spreading industry. As people roam the coasts of the wind-swept island, seeking pre-curated memories, they only stop for the most captivating sceneries, gas, and snacks. Even when tourists bring revenues, these focus on specific businesses and possibly seasons. In addition to revenues, they also pose a stressor to public services such as health care, police, and road maintenance. Many of those staying in the area are hidden from the statistics; thus, their impact is not considered when public investments are made. New jobs in the area may be mainly seasonal, and people arriving to do them often do not take part in building the communities around them. In this situation, many small communities in Iceland find themselves in a paradoxical situation, where there is plenty of activity and people moving around them, yet the benefits that lively activity usually brings forth are lacking.
To add to the paradox, despite communities in the whole Vesturland region suffering from a declining population, there is also a lack of housing and office spaces. Several homes that were before filled with permanent residents are now used by tourists and second-home owners, meaning that they remain empty for a large part of the year. Even though homes are occupied, less people are participating in social life because fewer people staying in the area are permanent residents. So the risk for resentment between permanent and seasonal residents grows.
Workshops to discover local well-being from the bottom up
The work done under the Fragile Communities project in Dalir has focused a lot on community participation. In practice, this means that all activities are based on a series of large workshops organised within the community. They begin by agenda setting with an open focus, so that locals decide for themselves what they wish to talk about and what issues are most important to work with. From this basis, a detailed action plan and then different events spring up. The trickiest issues discussed in the workshops had to do with the lack of housing and accessibility problems related to the road infrastructure. More in-depth discussions in smaller groups representing different social groups continue. A larger cooperative project aiming to tackle a key issue to the vitality of the region is making sheep farming areas more economically viable to ensure that people can remain in their profession, and as a result, that kids can remain in schools.
During the project, locals can apply for grants for innovation and social projects. These can take the form of various events or setting up hobby groups like choirs or a community theatre, but even lead to establishing new businesses. The main criterion is that the project has to be located in the area. The project also set up a space for communal events and an event calendar to help build on the continuity of the work even after the project has been completed.
Discovering local identity with the help of research
People living in places like Dalir may have an unclear idea of their homeland, leading to a lack of pride in it and, as a result, a lack of belief in their ability to tackle the large and complex challenges that living in a remote community entails. When this experience is combined with that of being marginalised by the state, with the struggle to provide essential public and private services, the local opinion may turn pessimistic towards their own situation.
What makes up the essence of a place? Using research and marketing has helped discover a more positive sense of identity, for example by finding out which sceneries and themes people living elsewhere associate with the region. Research can also help shape municipal actions to reflect better the local realities. This can mean something very simple like changing the official colour scheme of municipal branding to match what people see as the most important or most beautiful aspect of their home. Or it can lead to realizing, for example, that local cultural activities were designed more to please tourists than local people, and that replanning them makes people feel more connected to their surroundings again.
Locally produced imagery
What is the essence of an area beyond the prevailing discourse over population decline? In the context of the Fragile Communities project, a survey was conducted to discover some answers to this question. One stray of the local identity was found to be most rooted in rural living, (sheep) farming nature, and the deep green shades of steep hills. The next step is to discover what to do with this knowledge. Some concrete things could be marketing locally produced food more and in general using more imagery that genuinely relates to people’s own connection with the community in municipal messaging and in branding for the area. In the process, it could be possible to find a new common discourse to change the common perception of the place, one that could be rooted in themes such as rurality or innovation. The Fragile Communities project discovered that there is a plethora of possible routes.
Dalir as an example of the Smart adaptation in rural municipalities project
As we see, Dalir has taken up several measures that other municipalities that seek ways to adapt to population decline have also experimented with. There has been extensive cooperation with neighbouring municipalities in combining services such as school rides and rotating municipal workers such as city planners. Some also set up municipal cooperatives to either run activities together or buy services from a bigger city. Cooperation between municipalities has also encompassed culture, recreation, and social life. Kids visit each other schools for swimming, making pizza and school discos, young people get a ride to visit the nearest high school to use its workshop space, and elderly people have shared rides to go to concerts together or meet up to play cards. These activities are a combination of self-led ideas and municipal help in practical organization.
The suburban railway station Darnytsia. Workers go from this station to their hometowns and villages every Friday after the working week. Picture: Interviewee
What others can learn from Dalir
The co-creation work has made the community more vibrant and active. Setting aside separate time to discuss with various social groups has also been important. For example, elderly people who make up most of a community may feel excluded and even dismissed in a situation where their large share of the population is often presented as the core of a problem. Actively involving them in community discussions is thus an important tool to remind them of their agency in a community.
The biggest challenge of Dalir has been mobilizing the community itself and making people believe in their own power to make a difference. Therefore, the stance that the project took with a bottom-up agenda setting has been essential to address this challenge, empower the local community, and help them re-discover a more grounded sense of identity. Many popular ideas making a big difference in mental well-being, such as making it possible to have an active social life in a small community by offering people spaces and transportation, are not costly. The main thing needed is functional coordination between public servants who know their area and its needs.
Picture: Unsplash
