Towards a cordial dialogue between lifestyle migration/mobilities and rural tourism geographies

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue Changing dimensions of lifestyle mobilities in turbulent times: impacts of COVID-19 outbreaks and multiple crises. It aims not just to understand the individual drivers and consequences of mobility but their interactions with local manifestations of spatial (in)justice in various meaningful places. This editorial synthesizes the four studies of population flows in proximate and remote rural areas in Europe, and puts their contributions to the fields of lifestyle migration and mobilities in context. We introduce the lifestyle migration hub meeting that inspired this special issue and a mobility spectrum around which the article revolves. We then indicate common interests of lifestyle migration and rural tourism geographies, focusing on the contributors’ use of human geographic perspectives and aided by observations from ongoing ethnographic work about the demographic future of small villages in northern Sweden. A discussion of multiple disruptions, precarity and vulnerability is linked with a review of the papers before elaborating on destinations and communities as meaningful but vulnerable places. The conclusion outlines how concerns with people’s and place’s vulnerability and precarity in multiple disruptions to mobility flows can be further explored in cordial dialogue between scholars of lifestyle migration/mobility and tourism geography.

KEYWORDS:

• Crises
• lifestyle migration
• precarity
• rural geographies
• tourism
• vulnerability

Introduction

This editorial introduces the special issue on Changing dimensions of lifestyle mobilities in turbulent times: impacts of COVID-19 outbreaks and multiple crises. The special issue comprises four papers that collectively illustrate how different spatial, temporal and socio-economic dimensions of lifestyle mobilities have been affected as a result of the pandemic and other contemporary crisis events in different geographic contexts. Lifestyle mobilities have been conceptualized as population mobilities driven by an ongoing quest for a better life, with an emphasis on the increasing blurring between common divides of ‘home and away’ or socio-spatial practices related to ‘work, travel and leisure’ (Cohen, Duncan, and Thulemark 2015). This further extends previous work on lifestyle migration which, although mostly applied to residential migration, has offered a conceptual framework beyond the scope of concepts such as amenity-seeking, leisure migration, seasonal migration, second home ownership, retirement migration or (international) counterurbanization (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b, 2).

We view lifestyle mobilities as covering a broad spectrum of voluntary population flows (Hall 2005; Müller 2021), ranging from local to global and short-term to long-term (and more or less permanent) relocations, and from one-off to more frequent or even ongoing transient movements. These may include (residential) tourism, seasonal migration, circulation, labour migration and commuting, retirement migration, lifestyle migration, second home mobilities, visiting friends and relatives (VFR), and multi-local living. The value of such a spectrum is that it allows us to consider partly overlapping mobilities that may vary based on their spatial, temporal and socio-economic dimensions but are difficult to delineate and place in discrete boxes, as multiple forms of mobilities may coincide in the same place and influence each other (Bell and Ward 2000; Benson and O’Reilly 2016).

Lifestyle conceptualizations in migration and mobility studies have offered important insights into the motives and practices of mobile individuals (e.g. Benson and Osbaldiston 2014; Benson and O’Reilly 2016), but they have also remained debated in wider fields of geography. There are ongoing discussions about the extent to which lifestyle motivations can be separated from other economic or social motivations, and the role of relative privilege as an underlying precondition of such movements (Benson 2014; Scott 2019; Korpela 2022). Perhaps more problematically, lifestyle migration and mobility studies have been conducted across a wide range of geographic, socio-economic and political contexts, and across different origin-destination or visitor-host constellations, but they have been criticized for paying relatively little attention to the role of place (e.g. Osbaldiston and Buckle 2022). There is, thus, a need for more systematic geographic differentiation and theorization in order to better explain such mobilities in different parts of the world. This special issue responds to previous calls for a reappraisal of local conditions in concert with mobilities (Jones 2010; Woods 2011) and attempts to raise more attention to the role of geography within the field of lifestyle migration and mobility. The aim is not just to understand the individual drivers and consequences of mobility but their interactions with local manifestations of spatial (in)justice in various meaningful places.

The initial idea for this collection emerged from discussions held at the 2019 Lifestyle Migration Hub¹ meeting in Umeå (Northern Sweden), with over 40 colleagues presenting and discussing changing mobility practices in response to shifting political, economic and environmental circumstances (Eimermann, Hayes, and Korpela 2019a). The discussion framework considered both agency (decisions and practices of individuals) and structures (social norms, expectations, imaginaries, laws), and how interactions between structure and agency change over time (O’Reilly 2012). In particular, the focus was on understanding the implications of major crises and disruptive events for previously uncomplicated lifestyle mobilities and migration. The meeting was initially centred around events such as Arab Spring, Brexit, or the Global Financial Crisis, and called for wider understandings of lifestyle migration and mobility in changing political, economic and environmental times.

Since the 2019 Lifestyle Migration Hub Meeting, the outbreak of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have somewhat eclipsed debates about the impacts of previous crises and disruptive events on lifestyle mobilities. In particular, there have been discussions around new particularities of counterurbanization (Sandow and Lundholm 2020; González-Leonardo, Rowe, and Fresolone-Caparrós 2022; McManus 2022; Tammaru et al. 2023) and increasing urban-rural second home mobility (Seraphin and Dosquet 2020; Colomb and Gallent 2022), as well as a reconfiguration of tourist flows through international border closures and the emergence of ‘proximity tourism’ (Lebrun, Corbel, and Bouchet 2021; Panzer-Krause 2022; Pichierri, Petruzzellis, and Passaro 2022). While this has generated speculations about a new rural renaissance and migration turnaround, we argue that more research is needed into the complex geographic nuances of such recent trends.

Lifestyle migration does implicitly reference unequal geographies of surplus extraction, which some local communities have sought to leverage, for example, in order to inject new community spirit in areas experiencing demographic decline, or to market real estate and lifestyle experiences to higher income and more mobile workers, tourists or retirees (Eimermann, Hayes, and Korpela 2019a). Better understanding lifestyle migration and lifestyle in migration is important to policy-makers in various countries and on different scales of decision-making (Eimermann, Hayes, and Korpela 2019a; Benson and O’Reilly 2016), for instance as part of the EU’s long-term vision for Europe’s rural areas (European Commission 2022). New forms of transnational mobility were well under way before the pandemic, merging with increasingly intense regimes of labour and capital accumulation (Hayes 2021).

Thus, the four papers in this special issue study novel dimensions of precarity and vulnerability in lifestyle mobilities in times of multiple crises (e.g. Elander 2020; Shorter 2021; Tzanelli 2021; Elander, Granberg, and Montin 2022), and how these have been impacted by the pandemic and other crisis disruptions. In synthesizing the findings from these papers, we also discuss how different rural areas characterized by different mobility histories, tourism and amenity contexts, as well as infrastructural and regulatory constraints, are likely to experience major disruptions to their mobility flows and related socio-economic impacts. The geographies in question consider quantitative and qualitative aspects of rural population and tourism geographies. They range from rural catchment areas contained as part of functional cross-border regions in the Nordic countries (Aagesen, Järv, and Gerber 2022), to less popular low-amenity areas in Ireland and Wales (Goodwin-Hawkins et al. 2022), to an isolated Arctic island settlement characterized by extreme remoteness (Brode-Roger et al. 2022), and the hinterland of popular tourism destinations in Portugal (Nijhoff and Torkington 2022).

Common interests of lifestyle migration and rural tourism geographies

This section provides an outline for cordial dialogue between lifestyle migration researchers and rural tourism geographers, as further detailed in the conclusions below.

This editorial is inspired by the conceptual contributions of the field of lifestyle migration as a way of thinking about different forms of migration and mobility. Rather than trying to capture and categorize the flows and behaviours of a discrete or homogenous category of migrants, the lifestyle concept provides a ‘lens’ to investigate how economic and social factors intersect with lifestyle in migration (Benson and O’Reilly 2016, 25). It also opens up avenues to study the role of lifestyle as imagination, aspiration and way of living in other migration processes not necessarily labelled lifestyle migration. As a subjective term with different contents for different individuals, lifestyle as a concept marks the apparent free choice to pursue a way of living through migration as an ongoing process (Benson and O’Reilly 2016). As such, the process of migration can be seen as an expression of free choice within wider projects of identity-making (Benson and O’Reilly 2009a). Lifestyle migration research has focused on people approaching migration as consumption-led and voluntary movements (rather than production-led and involuntary, as commonly observed in other migration flows [Benson and Osbaldiston 2014]). A focus on lifestyle in migration reflects ‘the drive towards a better way of life, the meaningfulness and values ascribed to particular places’ and the potential for self-realization embedded within the notion of spatial mobility (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b, 3).

Early conceptualizations of lifestyle migration related this to people’s escape from somewhere and something to self-fulfilment and negotiations of a new life (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b, 3 original italics), with globalization, individualization, increased ease of movement, flexibility in working lives and increased global relative health as structural changes from the late twentieth century on. Early ethnographic lifestyle migration research often drew on the concept of privilege to study relatively affluent middle-class people and enabling factors, for example in intra-EU relocations (Amit 2007; Benson 2014). These subjective terms have also been related with the ways in which they shape material and social relations in uneven and unequal ways (Hayes 2021). It has been argued that some migrants’ ability to carry out imaginings of another way of living in more meaningful places, spaces or cultures reflects relative material privilege as they experience greater agency and autonomy in relation to borders, receiving communities (e.g. when incomes there are lower, ibid.) and other migrants (Scott 2019). This has been ascribed to many European and Western lifestyle migrants enjoying greater resources (Lundström 2017).

Following the mobility turn in social sciences (Urry 2000; Sheller and Urry 2006), the field of lifestyle migration has broadened substantially to consider the role of lifestyle in influencing more temporary and non-residential forms of mobilities. In part also pioneered by geographers, this has led to conceptualizations of mobilities driven by tourism, recreation and lifestyle motivations along a broad mobilities spectrum, plotting various mobilities along time and space (Bell and Ward 2000; Hall 2005; Müller 2021). Space considers origin-destination dimensions via regional, national and global scales, while time considers temporal dimensions such as the duration and frequency of movements. Hall (2005), for example, uses this spectrum to schematically outline tourism-related mobilities spanning from daytrip excursions via overnight stays to longer-term migration. Bell and Ward (2000) underline that transitions between mobilities are fluid and that no person or group can or should be placed in one discrete category only. Individuals can engage in various mobilities simultaneously or in sequence. Thus, hosting communities and destinations can emerge as spaces where multiple flows and fixities may converge simultaneously, which may also influence each other subsequently as part of a tourism-migration nexus (Hall and Williams 2002; Castilla-Polo et al. 2022). These are the main reasons why we view lifestyle mobilities as covering a spectrum of internal and international voluntary, transient, temporary, and more or less permanent spatial relocations.

Alongside the many contributions of lifestyle migration research, one limitation of the field is that it has focused too little on destinations,² communities and continuity in places after (initial) migration. Although lifestyle migration scholars have studied the integration of migrants in receiving areas and considered geographic aspects in such processes (O’Reilly 2000, 2003, 2007; Benson 2011; Casado-Diaz 2012; Torkington 2012; Janoschka and Haas 2014; Olsson and O’Reilly 2017; Osbaldiston and Buckle 2022), they have rarely looked at multitudes of mobilities converging in rural places, or at connections with pandemic-related or other disruptions. The following observations drawn from our ongoing ethnographic research about the demographic future of small villages in northern Sweden (Carson and Carson 2022; Eimermann et al. 2022) serve as examples of the concurrent and partly interconnected mobility flows affecting rural communities and local economies, and point to a number of under-researched topics in this context:

• During the pandemic, some villages experienced a disruption of previously established international-origin lifestyle migration, second home and VFR (visiting friends and relatives) in-flows, while second home visits from regional and domestic origins increased in both numbers and duration.

• There was a noticeable increase in transit travel during the summer seasons, including an increase in proximity tourists and domestic caravans, but the relative lack of commercial infrastructure and services meant that local economic benefits for villages outside the bigger tourist centres remained limited.

• While there may have been more people physically present in the villages due to increased work-from-home and less out-commuting, this did not necessarily generate any apparent economic stimuli for local development due to limited local services and business capacity.

• Pandemic restrictions and cancellation of social events provided fewer opportunities for social interaction, and gave newcomers in particular little chance to interact and contribute to local communities.

• The same restrictions also meant fewer opportunities for outgoing mobility and social interactions for other vulnerable community groups, such as the elderly. Issues of social isolation for such groups were further exacerbated by reductions in incoming mobile service workers (e.g. social, health or aged care) visiting the villages.

• Towards the later stages of the pandemic, some international migrants left the villages indefinitely to reconnect with families and friends abroad. These outmigrants often did not sell their properties (but chose to keep them as holiday houses for the future), so new in-migration flows are constrained by reduced housing stock.

• Village residents and second home owners invested more in home-based housing and recreation and travelled more locally rather than going elsewhere during the pandemic. However, outbound and international travel eventually resumed after the pandemic restrictions were lifted, meaning that local tourism and retail were likely to experience delayed negative effects.

Such examples of people’s and place’s precarity and vulnerability are further discussed in the papers in this special issue. Together, they exemplify topics for deeper dialogue between lifestyle migration researchers and rural geographers.

Multiple disruptions: precarity and vulnerability

The first of three main issues discussed during the 2019 Lifestyle Migration Hub meeting regarded lifestyle migration and mobilities in changing political times. This referred to, for instance, Brexit’s sudden insecurities and vulnerabilities for British lifestyle migrants residing in Southern Europe, and the emotional and material impacts on their lives (Benson 2019; Benson and O’Reilly 2020). The second issue regarded changing practices in relation to economic shifts (including financial crises), which related to housing and income strategies, as illustrated by the case of French retirees in Morocco (Pinel 2021). The third issue regarded wider understandings of lifestyle migration in changing environmental times, which related to (lifestyle) migrants’ perceptions of climate change, both before and after their initial migration.

The current unfolding of multiple crises implies novel structural changes, giving new impetus to vulnerabilities for lifestyle migrants and temporary mobilities, both in sending and receiving areas (Bell and Osti 2010; Janoschka and Haas 2014; Brode-Roger et al. 2022). As noted by Benson and O’Reilly (2016, 21), the lifestyle migration concept ‘does not preclude the possibility of economic factors’, and ‘relative privilege may coexist with precarity and vulnerability in ways that absolute understandings of wealth, privilege and affluence might render invisible’. This is similarly highlighted by Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022), demonstrating how unaffordability of desirable property in home countries prompts migration to rural areas abroad. Lifestyle migration can also be seen as an act of resistance against neo-liberalization in which societal risks become individualized, for instance when people feel pressurized to perform at the work floor to keep up with economic acceleration (Persson 2019). Rural tourism geographers have raised similar concerns, for instance studying economic conditions (like currency potentials), as well as constraints and possibilities for (cheap) housing and transportation in terms of their impacts on length and frequency of visits (Müller 2021). More concretely, scholars studying second homes have asked to what extent (and for whom) these can be seen as safe spaces during the pandemic (Pitkänen et al. 2020). These observations provide insights into how larger structures may limit and shape lifestyle migration and mobility (Korpela 2020).

The papers in this special issue

The four papers in this special issue cover a diversity of mobility flows and demographic dimensions, and they problematize the perceived COVID-19-related increase of people escaping from cities to the countryside from a range of perspectives. They firstly differ considerably in terms of their geographic context and rurality dimensions, ranging from rural hinterland locations along Portugal’s high-amenity coast, to an isolated settlement in Europe’s High Arctic, to low-amenity regions in Ireland and Wales, and rural cross-border catchment areas across the Nordic countries. They study international migrants and tourism entrepreneurs emerging from a tourism-migration nexus, international and domestic labour migrants and temporary experience seekers looking for exotic work and tourism opportunities, domestic semi-retirees and families seeking a lifestyle change around downshifting (e.g. working less and benefiting from expected lower cost of living in cheaper rural areas [Eimermann, Lindgren, and Lundmark 2021]), and general flows of labour and recreational commuting. The papers also approach the topic of changing mobility dimensions and emerging precarities from a range of theoretical angles and methodologies, including the use of big data to quantify and visualize mobility flows, in-depth interviews with migrants and mobile individuals, and ethnographic observations. Taken together, the papers illustrate the complexity of lifestyle mobilities situated in different rural and urban contexts and provide a number of key insights into the potential and lived experiences of the pandemic and other disruptive crises concerning both mobile individuals and destination communities. The following paragraphs summarize the main findings and contributions from the papers.

The first paper in the collection by Aagesen, Järv, and Gerber (2022) presents a big picture view on mobility changes during the pandemic from a Nordic perspective, where intense cross-border mobility practices have long been the norm. It views mobility as a global megatrend in which people are constantly crossing nation-state borders for migration, tourism, work and other transnational practices. The paper’s novel contribution is to use big data drawn from a Twitter dataset, to examine pre-pandemic and pandemic cross-border mobilities in several Nordic case study regions, monitoring changing patterns of cross-border mobility flows and discussing potential reasons for such changes (van Houtum 2000). In doing so, the authors describe functional border regions as an organizational structure (Klapka and Halás 2016) and study how such functional cross-border regions can be delineated, drawing on Paasi’s (1991) work on regionalization with a focus on international borders.

Aagesen, Järv, and Gerber (2022) find that functional structures vary over time and space and they indicate that the relativity of human mobility can reflect the perceived attractiveness of urban and rural areas. The authors exemplify this with the reduced air traffic between Oslo and Gothenburg due to COVID-19 restrictions, while local cross-border travel remained. Thus, different mobility types and transport modes can partly explain the differences within and between their case study areas, for instance regarding how people with varying socio-economic backgrounds and ‘lifestyles’ are affected by border-closures. While the paper’s methodology is unable to separate lifestyle from other forms of mobilities, the big picture changes identified from social media data point towards important mobility shifts in work and recreational travel patterns, as illustrated by changing weekday commuting patterns and weekend travel. The authors conclude that more nuanced quantitative and qualitative data would assist in further understanding specific cross-border mobilities, particularly commuting, second home tourism and shopping.

The paper by Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022) focuses on the combined issues of work and quality of life in qualitative case studies in Welsh and Irish peripheral areas. These areas include the larger settlements of Swansea and Galway respectively, at times conceptualized as New Immigration Destinations with unfamiliar geographies of movement (McAreavey 2018). While much of the literature on lifestyle or amenity migration has traditionally focused on relatively popular tourist destinations and high-amenity areas, this paper specifically draws attention to the motivations and experiences of migrants moving to areas conceptualized as less popular or low-amenity areas (Bijker, Haartsen, and Strijker 2012; Vuin et al. 2016). These areas nevertheless attract substantial cohorts of migrants, second home owners and visitors for a mix of social, economic, housing and recreational reasons that often remain under the radar. The authors state that the COVID-19 pandemic has renewed the discourse of the rural idyll among cramped urban dwellers seeking greener, safer spaces, but they highlight spatial inequalities related to complex and inter-related issues of unequal income, affordability and uneven mobility potentials.

The paper links spatial justice with key challenges for shaping and sustaining rural economies since delivering digital technology, encouraging entrepreneurship and improving human capital may not be a panacea for ‘less popular’ regions. The authors focus on two inter-related aspects of spatial inequalities: their role in producing effects of relative affordability and the role of service provision in perpetuating spatial inequalities. These processes unfold in various ways across various rural areas, since different quality of life experiences are taking shape as a complex interplay between individuals’ relative privilege and spatial inequalities. Thus, bundles of capital and relative privilege ‘come into play differently for different individuals’ in their mobility decisions (Scott 2019, 1741). Moreover, Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022) illustrate how earlier crises have led to state retrenchments in rural service provision. A question for further studies of lifestyle mobilities, they state, is thus how lifestyle and (in)justice are interlinked in different spatial contexts.

The paper by Brode-Roger et al. (2022) presents narrative interview data collected in the Arctic Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, regulated by complex international law. The authors focus on Longyearbyen, a settlement with a highly mobile population transitioning from a coal-based community to a tourism- and research-based community (Viken 2008; Jensen 2009). Svalbard represents an extreme case of remote and isolated regions that are renowned for their dynamic and hyper-mobile communities, which typically emerge from high population turnover, an entrenched dependence on external labour and skills, and a somewhat exotic destination image attracting tourists, students, volunteers and young escalator migrants seeking adventure and unique work and recreational experiences (Viken 2008; Carson, Schmallegger, and Harwood 2010). The paper explores how forced and encouraged (im)mobilities impacted individual life choices both for people escaping from the city to the countryside and for mobility in other directions.

Brode-Roger et al. (2022) respond to Jensen’s (2021, 67) invitation to think with COVID-19 ‘as a catalyst for bringing about more nuanced and deep descriptions of banal everyday practices’ by taking a closer look at individual, emotional and embodied experiences of disrupted everyday life mobilities. The aim is to show how emotions and affects are part and parcel of all the landscapes, atmospheres and trajectories of practicing mobility (Glaveanu and Womersley 2021). As such, the authors agree with Cresswell (2021, 55) that COVID-19 ‘exposes and amplifies part of what has long been normal – a highly connected and often unstable networked world’. The paper also highlights how seemingly well-meaning attempts by distant central governments to protect delicate remote environments can reinforce (or create) structures that negatively affect agency and control over mobility decisions among individuals for whom mobility is key to their lifestyles and perceived wellbeing. The study reveals systemic inequalities and both individual and settlement-bound vulnerabilities, and how these factors impact on each other. The authors view the pandemic disruptions as material and tangible but also socially coded and affectual, drawing on the ‘politics of mobility’ concept to study how social relations both produce and are influenced by power production and distribution (Cresswell 2010). The interviewees’ shifts from mobility to immobility were often sudden, unprecedented, and challenging for their multiple lifestyle choices, including juggling family life, financial situations, social security, legal regulations and maintaining social relations with multiple locations.

The paper by Nijhoff and Torkington (2022) examines the experiences of Dutch lifestyle migrant entrepreneurs (LMEs) running lifestyle-oriented tourism businesses in the low-amenity eastern part of the Algarve (Portugal), with a focus on the onset of the pandemic (in 2021). The paper presents evidence of people escaping from the city to the countryside, while acknowledging the uneven geographic and social distribution of socio-economic impacts of the global pandemic. Specifically, the study identifies how the pandemic, through disruptions to international tourist flows as well as to the migrants’ own mobility patterns, has affected these migrants both economically and socially. The findings illustrate how the studied LMEs were able to adapt to major tourism disruptions caused by the pandemic, and that cancellations due to travel restrictions resulted in limited negative consequences regarding their social wellbeing, physical and mental health or financial situation.

Nijhoff and Torkington (2022) understand their interviewees’ relatively privileged status as ‘a set of accumulated structural advantages, benefits and entitlements’ ascribed to them (Jensen 2005). This is most clearly manifested through levels of economic, social and symbolic capital but also through their transnational social spaces and networks. This is similarly pointed out by Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022), who partly view their subjects as carrying privilege, including the cultural capital accumulated through professional service class roles, which have so far offered opportunities for a comfortable living almost anywhere (Spencer 1995). Combined with the LMEs’ social and economic capital, Nijhoff and Torkington (2022) indicate the fundamental role of place and spatialized contexts of the migrants’ lives and lifestyles for both themselves and their businesses (Cresswell 2014). In particular, they emphasize how the specific rural location and low-amenity context (compared to the more popular and expensive high-amenity resorts along the coast) have been instrumental in navigating the pandemic, as the interviewed migrants were able to hibernate the crisis temporarily in a location where living expenses and financial risks were relatively low.

In this editorial, we wonder how well the longer-term consequences for the LMEs (and people studied in the other papers), and their ongoing personal mobility choices are understood. One way to reflect on these questions is by elaborating on destinations and communities as meaningful places.

Elaborating on destinations and communities as meaningful but vulnerable places

Most conceptual underpinnings of lifestyle migration research draw on theories in sociology, and some of them are related to geographic considerations. For instance, as part of the move to or search for specific destinations, places are associated with the imaginings and meanings of life available there in terms of their potential for self-realization (Benson and O’Reilly 2009b, 6–7). Such imaginings are drawn from both personal experiences of the places and from wider cultural narratives (ibid.). As part of such geographies of meaning, the type of destinations people opt for indicates their reflections of how to live following migration, and they are important for the migrants’ mobility practices.

Benson and O’Reilly (2009a, 2009b) have proposed a tentative typology of destinations. These include high-amenity areas which are typically coastal retreats (and which represent social constructions of tourism spaces as places for leisure), places with specific cultural or spiritual attraction based on culturally specific meanings derived from long histories, for instance attracting Bohemian lifestyle migration (Korpela 2020), and finally rural idylls. The latter are commonly based on myths of order, tranquillity, space, closeness to nature, a more relaxed lifestyle, self-sufficiency and a sense of community. Adding to this, Brode-Roger et al. (2022) exemplify imaginings and meanings typically associated with more remote environments, which are more about notions of extremeness, isolation, adventure, wilderness, harshness, and thus also attract different demographics and more temporary mobility dimensions (Koster and Carson 2019).

For rural idylls, Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022) uphold the non-economic determinants of mobility, in contrast to the predominant focus in classic migration studies on higher wages in receiving areas, drawing on abstracted socio-economic indicators (de Haas 2011). This supports Hugo and Morén-Alegret’s (2008) earlier prediction that countrysides in high-income countries would be undergoing a transformation, in which international migration would play a major role. We relate this with Bell and Osti’s (2010, 201) observations regarding the continuing role of rural areas in social differences, which are also relevant for this special issue:

• the persistence of unequal access: the rise in price of fossil fuels is very relevant today! It will increase inequalities and require local solutions to issues of transporting people, goods and ideas, demonstrating the inequalities of (rural) mobilities;

• the persistence of place: the local dimension of the rural as communities, residences, cultural constructions and landscapes of production and consumption lead to distinctions that are still important factors in human wellbeing and development, bringing with them old and new stabilities of (rural) social difference;

• the persistence of flux: mobilities and stabilities continue to combine in different ways rather than erasing each other, making rural areas a constant source of surprise due to the interaction of both of the above forms of rural social difference.

In current times of multiple crises, the contributions in this special issue provide geographical considerations of how these social differences have intensified and changed. For instance, Nijhoff and Torkington (2022) argue that the studied rural space of Eastern Algarve, with low population density, has long been characterized by social and economic decline, but that it seems to be emerging in a post-pandemic era as a space of relative privilege in terms of attracting and retaining LMEs and upmarket tourism mobilities. The LMEs’ choice of location of their tourism businesses was based on pre-COVID-19 ideals of rural authenticity and counterurbanization, and the ‘therapeutic’ rural landscape (Hoey 2009; Chen and Wang 2022) combined with enough space to abide by the social distancing recommendations and other sanitary measures. This adds to ongoing discussions around the significance of place in lifestyle migration research and rural geography studies (Torkington 2012).

More specifically, Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022) refer to ‘the relational rural’, constituted materially and imaginatively (Halfacree 2006). This is based on Jones’s (2010, 251) definition of relational space as ‘the active product of reciprocal relationships’ between economics, politics and power geometries. They hold that specific spatial relations have observable effects, and that rural areas have always been ‘defined and imagined in relational terms, as relative to urban space and society’ (Woods 2011, 43). Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022) apply this to their study of counter-urban lifestyle mobilities, stating that a relational approach can assist in studying ‘interlinkages between subjective aspirations, bundles of privilege, relative affordability and spatial inequalities’. Brode-Roger et al. (2022) add insights to a shift in mobility studies towards more nuanced explorations of the various relationships people can have with mobility, transiency and place. They state that the value individuals place on (im)mobility has more to do with the ability to control their mobility than with movement in itself.

The papers, thus, contribute with articulations of geographic insights into studies emphasizing either stabilities and fixities on the one hand, the specificities of mobilities and spatial relations and their reproduction on the other hand, or a combination of all these (Heley and Jones 2012). The findings represent novel insights into ways in which ‘mobilities and place become together’ (Baerenholdt and Granås 2008, 1), noting that the spatial reach and frequencies of the studied mobility practices have become more restricted in current turbulent times.

The papers further demonstrate the complexity of lifestyle mobilities from the perspectives of visible and less visible transient populations, blended with longer-term residents. Although the main unit of analysis is individuals, the papers relate this to place, regions, landscape, rurality, businesses and sense of community. In tourists’, migrants’, commuters’ and others’ motivations for their mobilities, the papers note changing meanings of place as a discursive location to which people are attached in one way or another (Torkington 2012; Cresswell 2014, 2021).

To lift the analysis from individual experiences to more collective meanings, a focus on communities can complement the perspective of individuals. This would help improve our understanding of how crisis events such as the pandemic, and related changes of mobilities tied to a specific place, affect the wider socioeconomic system and interactions of mobile-immobile and global-local stakeholders. However, similar to debates in the literature on crisis resilience or community wellbeing, the question remains how to describe and delimit such communities in lifestyle mobility studies, and how the experiences of individuals can be scaled up and applied across a collective community or even broader regional scale (Robinson and Carson 2016). Brode-Roger et al. (2022) illustrate how communities emerging from a constant in- and outflow of people, and their interactions (or lack thereof) with immobile residents, are difficult to delineate spatially. Their paper also provides a good example of how different and complex mobility flows characterized by different spatial, temporal, and socio-economic dimensions, intersect in a place, and how different communities (of practice or interest) can emerge as a result. While there have been calls to study the interactions of mobile and immobile populations and their implications for community wellbeing and development, empirical work has usually considered particular groups of mobilities in isolation without considering how different mobilities intersect and influence each other and communities.

Within the need to study the precarity and vulnerability of lifestyle migrant and mobility flows, the underlying theme of the discussions featured at the 2019 Lifestyle Migration Hub meeting concerned the change in mobility practices employed in response to shifting circumstances and major political, economic and environmental disruptions to previously uncomplicated mobilities. Practices were seen as the result of both individual agency, larger structures (such as social norms, laws, expectations, and imaginaries), and the interactions between these two over time. A valuable unit of analysis may be described as ‘communities of practice’, understood as any social group (family, friends, neighbours, networks) that comes together and that has to work out how to get on together (Wenger 1998). This understanding indicates a level in-between enabling and limiting structures designated by supranational bodies, nation states, laws and rules on the one hand, and individual’s agency or lifestyle choice on the other (O’Reilly 2012; Torkington, David, and Sardinha 2015; Eimermann, Tillberg Mattsson, and Carson 2019b; Korpela 2020).

Conclusion: myths, dialogue and future research

This editorial has aimed to not just understand the individual drivers and consequences of mobility but their interactions with local manifestations of spatial (in)justice in various meaningful places. We here address some common mobility myths to initiate a cordial dialogue between lifestyle migration researchers and rural geographers. Much research on lifestyle migration and mobility, including in parts of this special issue, continues to represent rather exotic or extreme situations of peripheral, remote, isolated and new immigration destinations (McAreavey 2018). In addition, we call for attention for the less extreme and still also less well-known areas, such as in rural Wales and rural Ireland (Goodwin-Hawkins et al. 2022) or much of the northern inland areas in Nordic countries (Lundmark, Carson, and Eimermann 2020), which can be seen as the conceptual ‘boring bits in between’ amenity-rich rural areas and attractive urban areas (Koster and Carson 2019).

Several of the papers in this special issue, along with our observations of under-researched topics concerning the mobility experiences of neglected rural communities, link individuals’ privilege with collective level implications around spatial justice (Lefebvre 1970; Hooks, Lobao, and Tickamyer 2016; Jones, Goodwin-Hawkins, and Woods 2020). As discussed by Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022), the concept of spatial justice originally asserted everyone’s right to urban space, but it is also employed to interpret rural marginalization and revival. The authors call for more attention for the ways in which lifestyle mobilities intersect with spatial inequalities in incomes, housing markets and living costs, which are embedded in the broader structures and socioeconomic processes that describe and inscribe uneven spatial development (Goodwin-Hawkins et al. 2022, 3). Their study indicates how this is inter-related with uneven mobility potentials, as is also identified in sociologic approaches to lifestyle migration (e.g. Hayes 2021).

We therefore urge for continued long-term engagement with post-pandemic migration and mobility experiences to identify which people and places are winning and losing as a result of these changing dynamics. A key question is whether and how new spatial hierarchies and resulting spatial injustices emerge. During the height of the pandemic, the dominant academic and public discourse largely portrayed urban and popular urban-style (tourist) destinations as being affected by a decline in resident and visitor interest, in contrast to many rural destinations that were described as gaining renewed attention. Emerging post-pandemic research has since started to challenge these generic assumptions, arguing for a need to differentiate more clearly between rural geographies (McManus 2022). Indeed, some rural or regional destinations in closer proximity to larger metropolitan centres and in high-amenity zones with good transport and service infrastructures seem to have noticed an increase in in-migration and property demands, as for example experienced in various coastal areas, mountain resorts or gateway towns at the fringes of national parks. Meanwhile, the more distant and disadvantaged peripheries seem to have been less affected, at least from a residential or investment point of view, although cases of increased visitor flows from domestic and nearby source markets (linked to proximity tourism generated by border closures and long-haul travel restrictions) have been reported.

Related to ideas around a tourism-migration nexus (Hall and Williams 2002; Castilla-Polo et al. 2022), future research can regard whether peri-urban rural areas attract different relatively affluent populations than more remote rural areas (Lundmark, Ednarsson, and Karlsson 2014, 437). Some rural areas, particularly those near growing population centres and investment hotspots, face a myriad of new development opportunities while others may continue to face major socio-economic and demographic challenges in a reinforcement or acceleration of pre-existing spatial hierarchies and resulting injustices. Yet other areas may not want to opt for socio-economic growth as such, which is indicated by Goodwin-Hawkins et al. (2022, 4) as a ‘right to not catch up’. We therefore call for greater differentiation between rural typologies when making claims about pandemic mobility changes, also taking into consideration spatial and socio-economic dimensions of degrowth (Hall, Lundmark, and Zhang 2021).

This editorial, thus, contests myths putting too much faith in receiving mobile populations and the idea that the pandemic is over now. For some rural areas, pandemic-related shocks or disruptions are perhaps yet to come, for example when people engaging in local staycations and proximity tourism, which compensated many rural destinations for the decline in long-haul visitors, start travelling away again to make up for lost opportunities and travel experiences.

We encourage studying such issues while building up a mutual understanding through cordial dialogue between scholars of lifestyle migration/mobility and tourism geography. The lifestyle migration field could be developed by linking it to a broader mobilities spectrum and by elaborating considerations of migration and mobility flows’ short- and longer-term effects on communities and places in various destinations. Rural tourism geographers can learn from lifestyle migration scholars’ reasoning around individual aspects of identity, modernity and similar concepts in sociology and related disciplines. Such cordial dialogue also includes continued constructive discussions around methodologies, keeping in mind that lifestyle migration research is intended as a lens rather than focusing on firm categorizations of people that can be quantified (Huete, Mantecón, and Estévez 2013; Benson and O’Reilly 2016; Korpela 2020; Hayes 2021; Castilla-Polo et al. 2022).

Notwithstanding the widespread appreciations of mobilities (Urry 2000; Sheller and Urry 2006), we also note a reappraisal of local conditions and geographies in concert with mobilities (rather than opposite to mobilities [cf Jones 2010; Woods 2011]). This indicates an evolving mix of stability and mobility in social and economic life at physical, symbolic and relational levels (Bell and Osti 2010; Persson 2019; Benson and O’Reilly 2020). In this Virocene where multiple crises entangle (Elander 2020; Shorter 2021; Tzanelli 2021; Elander, Granberg, and Montin 2022), we can expect that new crises will continue to unfold. Such crises may become part of the normal rather than the out-of-ordinary, and studying their roles in constant renegotiations between mobility, stability and place would benefit from combining lifestyle migration insights with rural geography perspectives.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Work on this special issue was supported by the Swedish Research Council Formas for the projects ‘Mobilities, micro-urbanisation and changing settlement patterns in the sparsely populated North’, ‘Cities of the North: Urbanisation, mobilities and new development opportunities for sparsely populated hinterlands’, and 'Climate Change and the Double Amplification of Arctic Tourism'.

Notes

1 This is an international network of scholars studying and conceptualizing various forms of contemporary, fluid and flexible forms of mobility. For more information, please visit https://research.tuni.fi/lifestyle/.

2 We recognize that ‘destination’ may be misleading since the ongoing quest of lifestyle in migration may lead to various forms of circular, return or onward migration, as is widely recognized in lifestyle migration research.