As Bruno Latour pointed out in 2008, the French notion of a national park is “a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well tended roads, highly subsidized cows and handsome villages”, which abandons the elsewhere common idea of pristine nature. A national park in Finnish Lapland is rather different than one in France and nowadays a national park status has become a quality label for tourist centres located nearby – a guarantee for seeing wilderness-like nature.

Nature-based tourist centres in Finnish Lapland are urban(izing) centres in the middle of sparsely populated periphery – often next to a national park – and understood by the local inhabitants and tourists as hybrids of the rural, the urban and the wilderness. In growing tourist centres there are conflicts in planning and everyday practices regarding the multiple-use of the tourist centre environment that can be understood and analyzed through the division into the rural, the urban and the wilderness.

This presentation introduces a three elements model of nature-based tourist centres that describes the elements that together form the punctualized but, due to the quick growth, constantly changing socio-spatial unit that is called a nature-based tourist centre.

The research is based on data collected within the LANDSCAPE LABORATORIES project (2004-2007) which was coordinated by the Arctic Centre, University of Lapland and partially funded by the EU Life Environment program. The data was collected by focus group interviews and Gouldian maps in 2005-2006. The research area consisted of two nature-based tourist centres located in Finnish Lapland. The tourist centres are used here as examples that illustrate the socio-spatial model and allow us to discuss the model from Actor-Network Theory’s viewpoint.