From ruin to resource? House-matching projects as emergent spatial planning practices in rural Swedish municipalities

Source abstract

This article examines house-matching initiatives as emergent spatial planning practices in rural Sweden, offering new insights into how rural municipalities navigate vacant housing, demographic decline, and shifting imaginaries of rurality. Through a qualitative case study of the project From Abandoned Houses to Dream Houses (2023-2024), carried out in Sjobo, Tomelilla, and Ystad municipalities, we show that abandoned houses become resources not through inherent qualities but through socio-material processes of classification, storytelling, and collaboration. We conceptualize these processes as a house-matching assemblage, within which planning agency is distributed across municipal actors, real-estate agents, building preservation specialists, homeowners, prospective buyers, and material artefacts such as decaying structures, catalogues, or photographs. The study reveals how municipalities operate beyond their formal mandates by engaging in informal, relational, and affective practices that blur the boundaries between planning and real-estate work. In doing so, they mobilize emotional attachments, rural imaginaries, and the public interest to inspire both the release and acquisition of abandoned properties. By bringing attention to the affective, symbolic, and distributed dimensions of rural planning, the article elucidates how spatial planning practices are enacted through emergent governance arrangements in which affective relations and attachments actively shape planning outcomes.