Homeownership beyond the city : Lived experiences and ownership in rural Sweden

A majority of Swedish households live in ownership housing – especially in in regions outside of the metropolitan areas. However, much literature centers homeownership and housing struggles under financialisation as a predominantly urban issue, at the risk of obscuring the varities of financialisation appearing beyond the city. Thus, this thesis sets out to explore this gap, by examining generational experiences and everyday practices of homeownership in Leksand, Sweden, through a qualitative thematic analysis of interviews (N=12) across three cohorts of local homeowners. Drawing upon a housing pathways framework, complemented by Bourdieuan capital theory and a Gramscian understanding of ideology and hegemony, the findings show how dominant, financialised narratives of homeownership as the natural, secure and desirable tenure seem to persist across cohorts, despite differences in structural and material conditions over time. However, simultaneously, the study identifies localised practices and counternarratives that contribute to the renegotiating and challenging of urban market logics, where notions of heritage and local connection seems to shape housing pathways in a way that challenges purely financialised reasonings. Thus, by centring lived experiences outside of the urban, this thesis extends housing research beyond the metropolitian lens, highlighting how rural housing markets operate at an intersection of national ideologies and local realities, with their own logics, tensions, and possibilities.