Infrastructure as Connection
Szymon Kopania & Ryan Nguyen Le, Student Fellows.
How do people in rural areas remain connected to urban life? And what does this everyday mobility mean for rural–urban transitions today?
These questions guide Szymon Kopania and Ryan Nguyen Le’s Master’s thesis at Malmö University, where they study Urban Studies. Combining spatial development, transport systems, and sustainability, they examine how infrastructure shapes settlement patterns and everyday life. During their fellowship at TRANSITION, they explore how transport networks enable people to live outside urban centers while remaining closely connected to cities for work, education, and services.
“Our research looks at how transport infrastructure supports daily transitions between rural and urban environments,” they explain:
We are interested in why people choose to live outside cities while still depending on them — and how mobility systems influence these choices.
Rather than treating rural and urban areas as opposites, their project focuses on the connections between them. By analyzing housing prices, commuting time, accessibility, and infrastructure quality together, they seek to understand how mobility reshapes where people live and how regions develop. In this way, their work adds a spatial and sustainability perspective to TRANSITION’s broader interest in how places and communities change over time.
A previous field study at Botildenborg in Malmö, Sweden during their study program introduced them to urban farming and sustainability practices that expanded their understanding of cities as ecological and social systems. Since then, they have worked to combine this perspective with their strong foundation in transport studies. As they reflect:
“Our thesis reflects the integration of sustainability thinking and transport systems — and our shared interest in how infrastructure connects everyday lives across space.”
Through their focus on connectivity, Szymon and Ryan highlight a key dimension of contemporary rural–urban transitions: not only how cities grow, but how mobility shapes belonging, choice, and everyday life.