Elementary school closures in Sweden over two decades: Geographical characteristics and the role of distance

School closures have for long often been seen as a ‘rural issue’ and/or as a rural-urban dichotomy. We posit that such crude representations should be nuanced by help of intra- and inter-municipality analysis as there are differences and diversity between and within rural municipality classes. Based on this, we use official Swedish statistics to perform a spatially disaggregated analysis of the geographical characteristics of Swedish municipalities with different experiences of elementary school closures between 1997 and 2017. The results show that rural municipality classes lost considerably more elementary schools, 24,5 % compared to only 0,3 % in urban municipality classes, but also show large differences between and within rural municipality classes and municipalities, both in terms of lost elementary schools, localities who has lost elementary schools, concentration of elementary schools to municipal population centers, and decreases in mean and median distances from elementary schools to municipal population centers. In some cases rural municipality classes fared better, performed at par, or only slightly worse to their urban counterparts. In conclusion, there is a need for a more disaggregated spatial analysis to understand what is happening in different geographical contexts, since the categories of ’urban’ and ’rural’ hide more detailed but still important spatial differences. • Crude representations, such as rural issue and/or rural-urban dichotomy when studying elementary school closures should be nuanced by using spatially disaggregated analysis. • Results show that net school closures almost exclusively take place in rural municipality classes, while the differences between and within rural municipality classes shows large disparities. • Some rural municipalities fare better, perform at par, or only slightly worse compared to their urban counterparts in terms of elementary school closures. • The categories of ’urban’ and ’rural’ hide more detailed but still important spatial differences.