Patrik Tornberg

Spatial Story

Geography always fascinated me. Perhaps it is because I moved around between different parts of Sweden growing up. Maybe it comes from my grandfather telling me stories as a child of all the countries he had visited. It might be from learning to navigate the boat during our yearly summer vacations in the Stockholm archipelago. Of course, as a child I didn´t label these things as different aspects of geography. They were just parts of life that happened to make an impact on me.

Having done some travelling on my own after finishing school, I bounced around between different subjects at the universities in Uppsala, Stockholm and Lund. But when I realized that you could actually study geography as a university subject, everything fell into place. It became clear to me that maps were my go-to tool to make sense of things, whether understanding the challenges of urban and rural areas, identifying political interests at different levels of government, or simply just finding my way in the Stockholm archipelago or a foreign city. But I also realized the limits to maps as a source of knowledge, and the value of experiencing places to understand them. Field trips and study visits taught me how insightful it could be to see and hear the actual environment, feel the terrain under your feet, and to access the local knowledge of people with roots in a specific place.

Maps are wonderful sources of explicit knowledge, while experiences of places provide supplementary tacit knowledge. That is why I think combinations of quantitative and qualitative methods tend to form the most fruitful research approaches. To me geography is all that. And it never stops fascinating.