Banal placemaking: spatial conceptions in an Icelandic provincial newspaper in the 1880s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing theoretic inspiration from the spatial turn within humanities, this article attempts to develop methods for studying placemaking in news media. This is done by a case study of the newspaper Þjóðviljinn, published in Ísafjörður, Iceland, in the late nineteenth century. The concept ‘banal placemaking’ is suggested for the kinds of spatial conceptions that occur in the paper without the explicit aim of creating an image of a place. When reading the paper in this way, a multitude of places and counter-places occur in the text. The town is contrasted with the countryside, the region with Reykjavík, and Iceland with Denmark. Icelandic spatial conceptions changed with urbanization and the coming of new regional centres.