A critical response to the (non‑) place of rural leisure users within the counterurban imagination

              © PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural. ISSN 1695-7121
Vol. 12 N.o 3. Special Issue. Págs. 515-523. 2014
www .pasosonline.org
1. Introduction: consuming the dynamic
European countryside
It has now become something of a truism that
the European countryside should be recognized as a
highly dynamic and rapidly changing environment.
This is apparent both from the perspective of land
use and ecology and in terms of socio­‑economic
and cultural issues. Change has long been a core
expressive feature of the urban world – possibly
one of its defining features, expressing renewal,
revitalisation and renaissance – but the need to
make a similar case for the rural reflects a predo-minantly
dualistic perspective on urban and rural.
This has historically placed them as socio­‑spatial
opposites: the urban epitomises change, the rural
reproduces stasis. Oliva (2010: 284) summarises
the position thus:
‘the rural world was generally considered the
antithesis of urban changeability and speed. The
inertia and stability of rural life... were imagined
somewhere in the background to the social whirl
and mobility of modern cities’.
Abstract: The concept of ‘counterurbanisation’ is now widely recognised within several branches of aca-demia.
Over the last four decades it has come to represent the net migration of people to more rural areas,
notably although not exclusively across many countries within the Global North. It focuses on ‘permanent’
relocation, having separated itself within scholarship from more ‘temporary’ movements to rural areas, not
least those undertaken for leisure purposes. This paper addresses this intellectual positioning of counterur-banisation
and its exclusion of leisure users, arguing that, in some circumstances, it may now be unhelpful.
In particular, recent discussions around the idea that we now live in an era of mobilities can lead to question-ing
both the idea of ‘permanent’ migration and its separation and implicit prioritisation over other forms of
mobility. This leads to the paper advocating reconciliation between rural in­‑migrants
and rural leisure users
within a much broader counterurban imagination.
Key Words: counterurbanisation, rural leisure, mobilities, classification, rural populations.
A resposta da crítica ao (não) lugar dos usuários de lazer rurais no contexto do conceito ‘counterurban’
Resumo: O conceito de ‘counterurbanisation’ é hoje amplamente reconhecido dentro de vários ramos da aca-demia.
Ao longo das últimas quatro décadas tem vindo a representar essencialmente a imigração de pessoas
para áreas rurais, embora não em exclusivo, mormente em muitos países do Norte. O conceito centra-se na
‘permanente’ deslocalização, tendo-se distinguido dos estudos de movimentos mais ‘ temporários ‘ para as
áreas rurais , não tanto aqueles realizados para fins de lazer. Este artigo aborda, assim, o posicionamento
de ‘counterurbanisation’ e, em particular, os recentes debates em torno da ideia de que agora vivemos numa
era de mobilidades conduzindo ao questionamento do conceito de migração ‘permanente’ e da sua separação e
priorização implícita relativamente a outras formas de mobilidade. Deste modo, somos conduzidos à questão
da reconciliação entre (in)migrantes para o espaço rural e os usuários de lazer rurais adentro de uma ideal-ização
dita ‘counterurban’ muito mais ampla.
Palabras-chave: counterurbanisation, lazer rural, mobilidades, classificação, as populações rurais
A critical response to the (non­‑)
place of rural leisure users
within the counterurban imagination
Keith Halfacree*
Swansea University (UK)
Keith Halfacree
* Department of Geography ­‑
Swansea University, Swansea, UK. E­‑mail:
k.h.halfacree@swansea.ac.uk
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516 A critical response to the (non­‑)
place of rural leisure users within the counterurban imagination
But, as has been said, all that has now changed;
although this shift in representation may be lar-gely
confined to academia, and to rural studies in
particular. Any cursory examination of how popular
culture represents rural life immediately reveals it
still reproducing and thriving on the old dualism!
Nonetheless, returning to academia, in a background
paper for a major EU­‑funded
project on Developing
Europe’s Rural Regions in the Era of Globalization,
Michael Woods (2009: 6) emphasizes how:
‘the differentiated geography of rural Europe
is not static, but dynamic, shifting according to
patterns of social and economic restructuring and
trajectories of political reform. The contemporary
era of globalisation and late capitalism arguably
represents a heightened period of flux.’
Besides the importance of seeing a rural as-pect
to globalisation, rural dynamism also comes
through in models of rurality such as that of
post­‑productivism,
which engages with ongoing
dimensions of rural change and can even encompass
more potential dimensions (Halfacree, 2006a).
All of this, in turn, feeds into, for example, the
OECD (2006) calling for a ‘new paradigm’ for rural
development policy.
This essay argues that now we have attained a
much more dynamic sense of rurality and a firmer
recognition and acceptance of rural change, we
are in a position to revisit and reflect critically
on some of the intellectual devices through which
appreciation of this dynamism has been achieved.
This review should encompass our classificatory
practices, whereby how we construct objects of aca-demic
analysis itself comes under reflexive scrutiny
(Bourdieu, 1998; Halfacree, 2001). This is because
the necessary process of categorisation nonetheless
typically involves what Law and Whittaker (1988:
178­‑9)
termed ‘discrimination’, whereby:
‘new classes of objects are brought into being,
objects whose boundaries and properties are clearer
than those they have replaced, objects that may
more easily be interrelated with one another.’
How consistently discrete or robust these ‘new
objects’ actually are (Sayer, 1989) is a question
to be continuously asked if we are ultimately to
develop a fuller understanding of the entangled,
messy, confused and unstable totality of the social
world of which we are all part (Ingold, 2011).
Specifically for the present essay, critical scrutiny
can be given to how we academics have predomi-nantly
come to frame rural leisure users, consuming
the countryside for various pleasurable purposes,
relative to people undertaking residential migration
towards more rural locations. This scrutiny needs to
be set within a heightened appreciation of the dyna-mics
of rural populations (Milbourne, 2007), which
can be seen to blur, confuse and even transcend
seemingly established categories. Awareness of these
dynamics within the noted increasing consumption
role and potential of rural places provided a core di-mension
to the overall appreciation of rural change.
The argument of this essay is, in short, that one
consequence of seeing rural localities as having
been and continuing to be transformed through
economic restructuring (globalisation) and social re-composition
(Cloke and Goodwin, 1992) is that two
previously closely aligned sets of rural consumption
practices – leisure users and in­‑migrants
­‑
have
become largely separated within research practice
and imagination. On the one hand, a key aspect of
rural economic restructuring has been identified
as leisure­‑
and tourism­‑related
commodification.
On the other hand, rural social recomposition
has been especially associated with in­‑migration.
Whilst this separation is sometimes informative, at
other times the divergence it has promoted within
scholarship may be detrimental to understanding
changing rural places.
The rest of the essay is structured as follows.
First, it turns briefly to the relative place of rural
leisure users and counterurbanisers within three
British Rural Geography texts, from the 1970s,
1980s and 2000s, respectively. This traces divergen-ce
between work on leisure users and in­‑migrants
but also hints at reconciliation. Second, the essay
presents a précis of academic understanding of
in­‑migration
– the ‘counterurbanisation story’
(Champion, 1998) – whose seeming finale, na-mely
that it largely expresses bourgeois lifestyle
migration, becomes the subject of critical query
in the third section. This challenges the emphasis
given in the counterurbanisation literature – and
in migration scholarship generally (Barcus and
Halfacree, forthcoming) – to the ‘permanence’ of
migration. Fourth, a brief digression into the ‘era
of mobilities’ reiterates this querying of perma-nence,
which leads to the concluding section’s call
to rethink academia’s counterurban imagination.
Specifically, such a rethink allows – in certain
circumstances at least – rural leisure users to
become a crucial element within an expanded
counterurban imagination.
2. Rural leisure users and counterurbanisers
within Rural Geography
Early in his career, Paul Cloke (1980: 182)
hailed Hugh Clout’s (1972) Rural Geography:
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Keith Halfacree 517
an Introductory Survey as ‘one of the first rural
geographical texts to remove itself from the main
tenor of agricultural economics’ and establish ‘a
legitimized subdiscipline’. As such, it is a good
place to start reviewing the relative academic
position and prominence of rural leisure users and
in­‑migrants,
henceforth ‘counterurbanisers’, two
groups which had started to be noted in scholarship.
Clout’s book associated both groups of rural
consumers together. Leisure users and the ‘ad-ventitious
population’ ­‑
who lived in rural areas by
choice but did not work there (Stamp, 1949) – were
united as representing urban encroachment into
the countryside. They expressed an ‘urbanization
of the countryside [that] can be produced by a
variety of mechanisms and take on a number of
nuances’ (Clout, 1972: 43), a combined ‘movement
of city people’ (Clout, 1972: 44), whether for living
or recreation. Urban origin and mobility, in short,
united them.
Subsequently, within the newly vibrant rural
geography sub­‑discipline
(Cloke, 1980), the two
groups of ‘urban’ consumers soon attracted conside-rable
research attention. Reflecting this, by David
Phillips’s and Allan Williams’s (1984) Rural Britain:
a Social Geography, little more than a decade after
Clout, they had acquired both heightened and
separate prominence. First, ‘counter­‑urbanization’
informed strongly the ‘Population and social
change chapter’, whilst five chapters further on
a whole chapter was allotted to ‘Recreation and
leisure’. By 1984, the pattern and content of this
separate development of scholarship within these
two areas was also already apparent. Numbers,
classification, motivations and socio­‑economic
and
cultural characteristics tended to dominate work
on counterurbanisation, whilst rural leisure and
tourism research adopted a more applied, planning
and economic emphasis. This distinction, although
not developed further here, immediately suggests
how dialogue between the two bodies of work might
be most fruitful.
Finally, two decades further on, Michael
Woods’s (2005) Rural Geography again had
the two groups separated by several chapters.
‘Counterurbanization’ dominated the ‘Social and
demographic change’ chapter, whilst the enhanced
consumption role of the rural was expressed stron-gly
in the ‘Selling the countryside’ chapter where,
for example, even farming was now seen as being
shaped by the demands and expectations of the
urban consumer. Markedly different literatures,
concepts and priorities were sharply represented
within the two contributions. Nonetheless, it is
also prescient for this essay to note that the social
and demographic change chapter contained near
the end a short section on second homes, presented
as a key expression of rural gentrification. After
years of separate development, therefore, is it
the case that counterurbanisation scholars are
beginning to (re­‑)
engage with rural leisure users?
If so, how are these links being made and how
might a rapprochement develop further for mutual
benefit? The present essay begins to address these
questions, approaching them from the ‘counte-rurbanisation’
perspective the author has most
experience with (e.g. Halfacree, 2008, 2009). This
requires first telling, after Champion (1998), the
‘story’ of counterurbanisation.
3. The counterurbanisation story
Until at least the 1970s, the overwhelmingly
dominant image of rural populations throughout
Europe in the 20th century was one of decline (e.g.
Johnston, 1966); a demographic loss captured
evocatively in the phrase the ‘drift from the land’.
Indeed, it is an image that persists today and, of
course, still accurately depicts the overall demogra-phic
experience of many rural areas across Europe.
Nonetheless, drift from the land, stimulated
in particular by agricultural decline, is certainly
no longer the only rural demographic game in
town. Particularly stimulated by evidence from US
census data from the late 1960s and early 1970s
(e.g. Beale, 1975), demographers and population
geographers began to notice that, in some parts
of some rural areas of some countries in Europe,
populations were increasing. This growth was not
substantially due to ‘natural increase’ – births
over deaths – but was coming about through net
population in­‑migration.
Again pioneered by US
researchers, commentators went on to speak of
a ‘population turnaround’ (Brown and Wardwell,
1980), even a ‘rural renaissance’ (Morrison and
Wheeler, 1976), with the long­‑dominant
trend of net
migration towards the cities being checked or even
replaced. What replaced it was labelled counterur-banisation
(with a ‘z’ in the US), its considerable
significance heralding ‘[a] turning point… in the
American urban experience. Counterurbanization
has replaced urbanization as the dominant force
shaping the nation’s settlement patterns’ (Berry,
1976: 17).
It was soon recognized that what was happening
was not simply metropolitan expansion but an
expression of people ‘voting with their feet’ and
choosing to live within more rural residential
environments. A complex pattern of counterurba-nisation
soon emerged, covering much of the Global
North (e.g. Champion, 1989; Boyle and Halfacree,
1998). In general, it could be expressed via a nega-tive
linear correlation between population growth
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518 A critical response to the (non­‑)
place of rural leisure users within the counterurban imagination
and settlement size (Fielding, 1982). However, as
researchers such as Tony Fielding and Tony Cham-pion
consistently made clear, counterurbanisation
creates a population mosaic, not a monochrome
painting, as it was also seen to express at least
three key types of selectivity. First, it was socially
selective, biased in favour of: higher social classes;
people in self­‑employment;
middle aged and retired
adults; non return migrants; owners of houses;
households of two or more adults. Second, it was
historically selective, not just in having developed
as a numerically significant phenomenon from the
middle 20th Century but also fluctuating with the
state of the economy, being strongest in economi-cally
buoyant times. Third, counterurbanisation
was and remains highly geographically uneven, at
both national scales and intra­‑nationally.
In terms
of the latter, it tends to be strongest in the more
accessible countryside, with many isolated, remote
rural areas still experiencing net out­‑migration.
In telling the ‘counterurbanisation story’ 16
years ago, Champion (1998) recognised a tale then
entering its third decade. Indeed, it remains a key
research area within both Population and Rural
Geography and further afield. Much effort has been
expended trying to explain it. Early understandings
moved from seeing it as some kind of ‘natural’ phe-nomenon
of human evolution to recognising how it
was enabled by technological developments – from
modern private transportation to labour saving
devices in the home – that allowed people to live
often many kilometres from their workplace. Cul-ture
soon came into the equation, too, with Berry’s
(1976: 24) initial assertion that counterurbanisation
was the ‘reassertion of fundamental predispositions
of the American culture... antithetical to urban
concentration’ becoming carefully and critically
nuanced. Elsewhere, though also with a strong
cultural dimension, counterurbanisation received
a ‘wholly darker, more hard­‑edged,
materialistic
and realistic explanation’ (Fielding, 1998: 42) that
linked its emergence and growth with dynamics
of the capitalist class structure, notably in terms
of rural areas increasingly presenting economic
opportunities (the rise of rural consumption no-ted
earlier) and providing a geographical habitus
(Bourdieu, 1984) for ‘service class’ identity.
Within all of this debate on the causes of counte-rurbanisation,
a key role has been given – not least
within the present author’s own work – to potential
and actual migrants’ place images (Shields, 1991),
imaginative geographies (Gregory, 1994), or spatial
representations (Halfacree, 1993) of rural (and
urban) places. Indeed, qualifying any emphasis
on the role of practical living, Dirksmeier (2008:
160, my emphases) could even assert that ‘[t]he
structure and situation of a rural area… are of
little relevance to the newcomers’ motives. It is the
conception of an idealized rural lifestyle which is
crucial in determining the actions and attitudes
of people at the time of their arrival’. These con-ceptions
of the counterurbanisers, as the quote
suggests, predominantly represent rural places
as residentially quasi­‑idyllic,
in contrast to the
largely anti­‑idyllic
city (Halfacree, 1995).
From all of this counterurbanisation scholarship,
one might conclude, as this author hypothesised
a few years ago (Halfacree, 2008), that scholars
may see little more very original to investigate or
insightful to say about counterurbanisation. Indeed,
within the last few years counterurbanisation has
increasingly become somewhat subsumed within
the wider suite of so­‑called
lifestyle migrations and
their diverse attempts to ‘escape to the good life’
(Benson and O’Reilly, 2009). Academically, in other
words, one might suggest the counterurbanisation
story has largely run its course. Arguing now that
this is actually far from the case (Halfacree, 2008),
the present essay will eventually return, in fact,
to rural leisure users...
4. Counterurbanisation beyond lifestyle
migration
Any seeming consensus of counterurbanisation
being reducible to a form of bourgeois lifestyle mi-gration
(e.g. Murdoch, 2006: 177) can be challenged
through bringing to the fore a range of ‘other’ coun-terurbanisations
(e.g. Halfacree, 2001, 2008, 2011).
Three particular strands can be identified. Whilst
not as prevalent as the bourgeois lifestyle category,
all reveal counterurbanisation in its totality to be a
more complex, multi­‑stranded
phenomenon or set
of phenomena. Moreover, whilst the origin of all
these moves may not be ‘urban’, their movement
into the rural makes them counter­‑urban
from a
rural perspective (Cloke, 1985).
First, there are ‘back­‑to­‑the­‑land’
migrants (Hal-facree,
2006b). These are broadly countercultural
people who relocate to a rural location in order to
combine agricultural smallholding with degree of
self­‑sufficiency.
Epitomised by proponents of what
Fairlie (2009) has termed ‘low impact development’,
back­‑to­‑the­‑land
lives centre very much around
a practical ethics that centres on relationships
with humans and non­‑humans
within an overall
land­‑working
network. Clearly, there is a degree of
overlap with bourgeois lifestyle counterurbanisers,
not least as going back­‑to­‑the­‑land
still represents
lifestyle migration, but it is instructive sometimes
to distinguish the group (Halfacree, 2001).
Second, whilst the counterurbanisation literature
has been dominated by what are known as internal
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Keith Halfacree 519
or intra­‑national
moves, engagement with broader
lifestyle migration scholarship has demonstrated
that counterurbanisation has some distinctly inter-national
strands. For example, there is ‘heliotropic’
(King, 2002) migration, not least of retired people,
to sunnier parts of Europe and beyond. More clearly
rural focused, however, are a number of detailed
studies of Britons who have moved to rural France,
for example. Pioneered by Buller and Hoggart (1994),
this work now extends to detailed case studies by
Benson (2011), Neal (2013) and others. Of course,
these studies still position counterurbanisation as
lifestyle migration, and also fit the dominant model
in terms of social class, motivations, and so on. More
complex in this respect is another form of internatio-nal
counterurban migration that involves ‘returning’
to a rural location left years before. Such expressions
of return migration, such as Irish returning to rural
Ireland from London or the US, ‘complicate... dualistic
categories of migrant and local’ (Ní Laoire, 2007:
343) and are less clearly lifestyle migrations in any
amenity­‑focused
sense.
Third, there are expressions of international
labour migration that can take a strongly counte-rurban
character. These flows return attention to
the value of always relating counterurbanisation to
the changing spatial and social divisions of labour,
thereby reviving ‘economic’ explanations (Fielding,
1998). For example, there is migration to rural
areas linked to continued high labour demand from
some forms of agriculture. These include flows of
North Africans to Spain and Eastern Europeans
to the UK (e.g. Woods and Watkins, 2008). Such
migration is certainly not lifestyle migration (as
usually understood) and has little space for ‘idyllic’
rural representations, thus fundamentally chal-lenging
any bourgeois lifestyle consensus.
One objection to bringing the latter group into
the counterurbanisation universe would be to point
out that they are generally ‘temporary migrants’,
coming for the work and then returning to their ori-gin
countries. However, this essay refutes such an
objection from at least two directions. First, how can
one be certain that such migrants will definitely be
‘temporary’? Even with an intention to return – and
even with state policies insisting on this, such as
providing temporary work visas only – some always
stay, whether legally sanctioned or not. Second,
even if presence is temporary ­‑
perhaps for just a
summer ­‑
the impacts of international migrants
on a rural place can be significant. For example,
they will contribute to the local economy, they may
have children requiring schooling, and they will,
through their labour, support local businesses.
Furthermore, even if individuals may be temporary
residents of a rural place, institutionalisation of
the labour migration system makes the presence
of ‘equivalent’ people much more permanent. This
gives a whole new sense of an ‘adventitious’ rural
population – one which is ‘not inherent but added
extrinsically’ (Free Online Dictionary, 2014) – than
that recognized by Stamp (1949).
What has been argued in this section, therefore, is
that no sooner has the counterurban ‘untamed beco-mes
domesticated’ (Billig, 1985: 86) conceptually into
a story that revolves around bourgeois lifestyles than
this contented picture is found wanting. New strands
and forces come into the picture, a key consequence of
which is to destabilise the permanent­‑binary
dualism
that features strongly within migration scholarship
(Barcus and Halfacree, forthcoming; King, 2002),
including that discussing counterurbanisation. It is
from this vantage point that the essay will shortly go
on to argue for the ‘return’ of rural leisure users to the
embrace of the broad counterurban family. However,
the vantage point will now be reinforced via a short
digression into the ‘era of mobilities’ (Halfacree, 2012).
5. The era of mobilities
Over a century and a half ago, Marx and Engels
(1848) famously declared how ‘all that is solid melts
into air’. Whilst the dynamism of capitalism being
referred to has remained one of its defining featu-res,
such a sense of mobility and dynamism has
recently been accorded more general significance,
both metaphorically and experientially. Mobility, in
short, is for some a (the?) contemporary zeitgeist:
we live in an ‘age of migration’ (Castles et al., 2013:
cf. Bauman, 2000; Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2007).
To get to grips with this mobile age, understan-dings
based on ‘movement, mobility and contingent
ordering’ must replace those emphasising ‘stasis,
structure and social order’ (Urry, 2000: 18). Such
new understandings challenge, in particular, a core
societal assumption of ‘sedentarism’ (Cresswell,
2006). This assumption, arguably reflected in the
ideas of philosophers such as Martin Heidegger,
for example, proposes that being still, bounded
and ‘authentic’ through ‘being­‑in­‑place’
is a core
foundational feature of (proper) human life.
Acknowledging within any proposed era of mo-bilities
the increased quantitative and qualitative
significance of migration within everyday life, while
necessary, is not enough. Migration’s own sedentarist
underpinnings, presenting residential relocation as
inherently both unsettling and abnormal, must be
challenged (Halfacree, 2012). One way to do this
is to present migration as part of the more general
mobile rhythms of lives led (Barcus and Halfacree,
forthcoming). Perspectives must shift from regarding
residential migration as an essentially unique or
distinctive form of movement to locating it within
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520 A critical response to the (non­‑)
place of rural leisure users within the counterurban imagination
a broad spectrum of mobility (Pooley at el., 2005)
that both expresses and shapes everyday life. Within
this spectrum, mundane, everyday mobilities, for
example, can be seen having numerous significant
impacts upon the human condition.
Conceptual re­‑imagining
of the place of migration
vis­‑à­‑vis
both its societal significance and its relations
to other forms of mobility has significant implications
for the scope of Population Geography’s interest in
people ‘on the move’ (Barcus and Halfacree, forthco-ming).
In particular, it suggests that we should not
automatically bracket out ‘permanent’ migration for
specific circumscribed analysis. Instead, acknowled-ging
‘the never­‑straightforward
boundary between
migration and mobility’ (King, 2002: 90), we should
recognize migration’s connections and parallels with
other forms of mobility; independent not separate
spheres (Sheller and Urry, 2006). Reiterating, we
must attend to the full spectrum of mobilities (Pooley
et al., 2005) if the relative place of migration within
lives lived across space is to be adequately understood
and appreciated.
A mobilities sensitivity raises many questions
within many areas of scholarship. One such area
concerns what is meant by ‘home’, also a central topic
within migration research. Conventionally, the home
has been presented as an essentially sedentarist
singular, fixed and rooted place. Yet, very simply,
does home have to comprise one place? Think how
slippery the concept is in terms of how it may be
defined spatially – house, village, region, country,
and so on (Blunt and Dowling, 2006). Consequently,
scholars promoting ideas such as transnationalism
(McEwan, 2004) challenge simple and singular
ideas of home. Generally, one can recognise homes
as becoming, routed through and emergent from
people’s everyday connections with places of diverse
‘everyday texture’ (Conradson and Latham, 2005:
228). Within such an imaginary, whilst ‘work, home
and play are separated in time and place, ...meanings
and identity are structured around not one but
several places’ (McIntyre et al., 2006: 314). Rural
second home consumers can exemplify this situation
well (Halfacree, 2011, 2012).
A predominant theme within academic work on
rural second home consumption is, understandably,
the mapping of patterns, trends and practices of
leisure usage (e.g. Hall and Müller, 2004). Yet,
scholarship has proceeded also to present second
homes as providing an ‘escape’ or ‘vacation’ from
the often challenging demands of ‘modern’ lifestyles
(e.g. Kaltenborn, 1998) and even to regard the se-cond
home as becoming an integral part of everyday
dwelling (e.g. Overvåg, 2009; Gallent, 2007). In
other words, what might be seen as an ephemeral
expression of leisure consumption becomes en-twined
within a more mobile conception of home.
Leisure practices – as, of course, its leading scholars
have long argued – take centre stage within the
practices of everyday life. This realisation provides
the final piece of the jigsaw that now allows this
essay to propose leisure users being ‘reconciled’
with more ‘permanent’ residential migrants within
a renewed counterurban imagination.
6. Conclusion: rural leisure users within the
counterurban imagination
This essay has argued several points within its
account of the development of counterurbanisation
and counterurbanisation scholarship. First, whilst
early to mid­‑20th
Century British rural scholarship
tended to associate both rural leisure users and more
permanent in­‑migrants
together, as expressions
of an adventitious rural ‘population’, these two
groups subsequently became increasingly separated.
Whilst both expressed the growing importance of
rural consumption, one can argue that it became
necessary to separate and discriminate them in order
to appreciate their significance. This was especially
the case for the emergence of large­‑scale
migrations
to rural locations, which became known as coun-terurbanisation.
Briefly tracing this demographic
shift revealed that, second, by the end of the 20th
Century it had largely been reduced to an important,
interesting but quite well understood expression of
lifestyle migration. Third, the essay argued that this
domesticated and discriminated representation of
‘counterurbanisation’ has increasingly been found
wanting, at least in qualitative terms of the range
of people expressing a counterurban shift. Within
this critique, crucially, the confidence we can have
in defining counterurbanisation as a ‘permanent’
relocation has been queried. This may have enabled
it to be discriminated from ‘temporary’ leisure users
but the validity of this hard divide is problematic.
Fourth, this discrimination is challenged further
by the mobilities paradigm and its implications, for
example, for sedentarist representations of home.
Consequently, it can be argued that forms of leisure
consumption, such as rural second homes, can present
rural environments as home places, even when no
‘permanent’ relocation has taken place.
The consequence of this narrative is that it may
now be time to consider rural leisure users in general
as important components within rather than external
to the counterurban imagination, as Woods (2005)
began to imply. Rural leisure users can become part
of a counterurbanisation story that has been told to
date largely without them. The full implication of the
mobilities turn is that ‘temporary’ residence alone is
inadequate to exclude such rural leisure users. This
new imaginary firmly represents counterurbanisation
PASOS. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural. 12 N° 3. Special Issue. Mayo 2014 ISSN 1695-7121
Keith Halfacree 521
as being more than just a permanent residential shift
‘from urban A to rural B’. Leisure users are reconciled
with residential migrants, one again through their
‘urban’ origins and their mobilities.
Finally, going further still, rural leisure users
can go on to take their place together with more
conventionally understood counterurbanisers and
other rural residents within Figure 1’s diagrammatic
depiction of the contemporary rural population (sim-plified
from Halfacree, 2012). This figure identifies
some 14 ‘slices’ of rural place consumer, the slices
imperfectly and unstably determined according to
what can be called ‘place commitment’. Roughly
speaking, this commitment can be defined by the
proportion of time (and consequent effort?) spent
‘within’ the identified rural environment. It draws
inspiration from Gallent’s (2007: 99) proposal of
an immersed to inhabited hierarchy, which ranges
‘from those who thoroughly dwell – and become (or
are) immersed within a place – to those who merely
“inhabit” in a more detached sense’. It centres the
(em)place(ment) issue within a mobile world: stability­‑within­‑movement
as Sheller and Urry (2006: 214)
express it. Leisure users, within this imaginary, have
at least as much stake in the 21st Century dynamic
rural as many more ‘permanent’ rural residents.
The adventitious, in all their diversity, have thus
truly come of age…
Figure 1. Consumers of Rural Places by
‘Place Commitment’
In­‑transit
visitors
Occasional visitors (non­‑residential)
Occasional visitors (residential)
Regular visitors (non­‑residential)
Regular visitors (residential)
Second­‑home
owners (irregular users)
Second­‑home
owners (regular users)
Dual location households
Long­‑distance
workers (rarely at home)
Long­‑distance
commuters (weekly)
Long­‑distance
commuters (daily)
Short­‑distance
commuters (urban)
Short­‑distance
commuters (rural)
Non­‑commuters
(in­‑situ)
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Recibido: 22/11/2013
Reenviado: 06/03/2014
Aceptado: 11/03/2014
Sometido a evaluación por pares anónimos