The physical boundaries of office work have become increasingly flexible. Work is conducted at multiple locations outside the office, such as at clients’ premises, at home, in cafés, or when traveling. However, the boundary between indoor and outdoor environment seems to be strong and normative regarding how office work is performed. The aim of this study was to explore how office work may be conducted outdoors, understanding how it is being experienced by office employees and identifying its contextual preconditions. Based on a two-year interactive research project, the study was conducted together with a Swedish municipality. Fifty-eight participants engaged in the collaborative learning process, including 40 half-day workshops and reflective group discussions, co-interviews, and participants’ independent experimentation of bringing work activities outdoors. Data was collected via interviews, group discussions and a custom-made mobile application. The results showed that a wide range of work activities could be done outdoors, both individually and in collaboration with others. Outdoor work activities were associated with many positive experiences by contributing to a sense of well-being, recovery, autonomy, enhanced cognition, better communication, and social relations, but also with feelings of guilt and illegitimacy. Conditions of importance for outdoor office work to happen and function well were found in the physical environment, where proximity to urban greenspaces stood out as important, but also in the sociocultural and organizational domains. Of crucial importance was managers’ attitudes, as well as the overall organizational culture on this idea of bringing office work outdoors. To conclude, if working life is to benefit from outdoor office work, leaders, urban planners and policymakers need to collaborate and show the way out.

Air pollution is responsible for one in eight premature deaths worldwide, and thereby a major threat to human health. Health impact assessments of hypothetic changes in air pollution concentrations can be used as a mean of assessing the health impacts of policy, plans and projects, and support decision-makers in choices to prevent disease. The aim of this study was to estimate health impacts attributable to a hypothetical decrease in air pollution concentrations in the city of Malmö in Southern Sweden corresponding to a policy on-road transportations without tail-pipe emissions in the municipality. We used air pollution data modelled for each of the 326,092 inhabitants in Malmö by a Gaussian dispersion model combined with an emission database with >40,000 sources. The dispersion model calculates Nitrogen Oxides (NO) (later transformed into Nitrogen Dioxide (NO)) and particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter < 2.5 μg/m (PM) with high spatial and temporal resolution (85 m and 1 h, respectively). The average individual reduction was 5.1 (ranging from 0.6 to 11.8) μg/m in NO which would prevent 55 (2% of all deaths) to 93 (4%) deaths annually, depending on dose-response function used. Furthermore, we estimate that the NO reduction would result in 21 (6%) fewer cases of incident asthma in children, 95 (10%) fewer children with bronchitis every year, 30 (1%) fewer hospital admissions for respiratory disease, 87(4%) fewer dementia cases, and 11(11%) fewer cases of preeclampsia every year. The average reduction in PM of 0.6 (ranging from 0.1 till 1.7) μg/m would mean that 2729 (0.3%) work days would not be lost due to sick-days and that there would be 16,472 fewer restricted activity days (0.3%) that year had all on-road transportations been without tail-pipe emissions. Even though the estimates are sensitive to the dose-response functions used and to exposure misclassification errors, even the most conservative estimate of the number of prevented deaths is 7 times larger than the annual traffic fatalities in Malmö, indicating a substantial possibility to reduce the health burden attributed to tail-pipe emissions in the study area.

IntroductionThis study deals with the process of change from industrial to recreational land use on a 60 ha piece of land. The site called Lake Arrie is situated 12 km southeast of Malmö in southernSweden (see Fig. 1). The lake, covering more than a third of the area, has originated from an abandoned gravel quarry in the midst of an agricultural landscape. It is argued that the case study of Arrie illustrates several general aspects of contemporary changes of land use in the contested city fringe. In this paper, we will put emphasis on conflicting interests, construction of nature and outdoor recreation, and on pluralism as a moral imperative. However, as the research project runs parallel in time with the planning and development process of the site,there is yet no final design of the area to be evaluated. The objective of this paper is to explore how complex social and political planning processes interact with changing and ephemeral views of nature and its physical manifestations in the landscape. Although the area itself is rather small and still in a transitional state, it provides significant examples of more general contemporary trends regarding landscaping in the city fringe. Results and knowledge produced in this research project are of a more general character, and are not primarily aiming at solving management issues in Arrie. Our study approaches the process from a human ecological point of view, looking at three 'levels of reality': the person, the society and the biophysical environment (Steiner, 1993, p. 56). None of those three take precedence over the other, but they are equally important to the multidisciplinary understanding of the process. Departing from this so-called 'human ecological triangle', we set out to identify and discuss the three levels, looking at the renegotiation of nature in the post-industrial society. The three levels can also be interpreted as constructions in three dimensions (Ouis, 2002): the mental, social and material dimensions.This differs from the social constructivist approach that tends to ignore the material reality (for a critique of such an approach, see Hacking (1999)). In this case, nature is constructed in the most physical of meanings: areas of wasteland are to be re-designed into nature for outdoor recreation. The new design, however, is ruled by contested ideals, social tensions and power relations, and those conflicts are in focus of our investigation.In this paper, we present a short background to the area and the current situation in Lake Arrie, setting out to capture the tendencies of the contemporary construction of nature for outdoor recreation. We will then move on to discuss the salutogenic (health promoting) aspects of outdoor recreation, and how these can be understood in the landscape of LakeArrie. We will further discuss the post-modern ideal of diversity as opposed to modernity's ideals of monoculture and universalism. Post-modernity cherishes diversity both in nature and culture. These ideals apply both to the planning process and to result...

Focusing on the notion of ‘green clothing’, this article shows how a sartorial aesthetic informs group cohesion for environmentalist activists. Using qualitative data gathered through open-ended questions posted on the Field Biologists’s Facebook group, which is no longer active, the article explores subjects’ memories and opinions on clothing and style covering the period from the late 1960s to the present. The article mixes this method with historical textual analysis of the tradition of frugality and asceticism back to nineteenth-century forerunners. This mixed method approach provides rich material on counter-consumerist aesthetics in both cultural and political contexts within a historical framework. Theoretically, the article revises the classic notion of clothes as a cultural membrane between body and society, showing how a third element – nature – works in certain ideological frames to dissolve that membrane between body and society. In this way, clothes are worn in order to demonstrate harmony between the wearer’s body and the environment. This dissolution of culture into ‘nature’ serves the collective pursuit of political community espoused by the Field Biologists. Through tracing a number of ‘vestemes’ (units of sartorial semiotics), this article decodes an identity formed around nature as opposed to culture; the old as opposed to the new; second- as opposed to first-hand; as well as around a complex relationship with gender.

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