Contested Spatialities, Lifestyle Migration and Residential Tourism

Michael Janoschka, Heiko Haas, Michael Janoschka, Heiko Haas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415628754
• eBook ISBN: 9781136232374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

Lifestyle Migration and Residential Tourism represent a major trend in individualized societies worldwide, which is attracting a rapidly growing interest from the academic community. This volume for the first time, critically analyses the spatial, social and political consequences of such leisure-oriented mobilities and migrations. The book approaches the topic from a multidisciplinary and international perspective, unifying different branches of research, such as lifestyle migration, amenity migration, retirement migration, and second home tourism. By covering a variety of regions and landscapes such as mountain and coastal areas, rural and inland communities this volume productively engages with the formal and analytical variations of the phenomenon resulting in an enriching debate at the intersection of different areas of research. Amongst others, topics like political contest and civic participation of lifestyle migrants, their impacts on local communities, social tensions and inequalities induced by the phenomenon, as well as modes of transnational living, home and belonging will be thoroughly explored. This thought provoking volume will provide deep analytical and conceptual insights into the contested geographies of lifestyle migration and further knowledge into the spatial, social and political consequences of leisure-oriented mobilities. It will be valuable reading for students, researchers and academics from a plethora of academic disciplines.

1 Contested spatialities of lifestyle migration

Approaches and research questions

Michael Janoschka and Heiko Haas

Within contemporary scientific discourses, lifestyle migration and other lifestyle-oriented mobilities, such as second home or residential tourism, are usually conceived as a temporary or permanent spatial movement of relatively affluent persons of all ages that travel and move between meaningful places with an individually imagined and collectively perceived potential to provide a better quality of life (Benson and O'Reilly 2009). There is qualitative and quantitative evidence that such privileged forms of mobility and migration have recently experienced a significant increase in terms of scale, scope and intensity worldwide. Similar to the conversion of tourism from an exotic experience and individual adventure into a mass phenomenon that took place earlier in the twentieth century, lifestyle migration, second home tourism and residential tourism have also experienced a general popularisation. In other words, such mobility strategies, which had for a long time been the privilege of aristocratic and upper classes, have now diffused to broader parts of the population. Additionally, with more people from various cultural and national backgrounds and diverging personal motivations involved, a growing variety of lifestyle mobilities can be observed with examples ranging from ‘counter-cultural dropouts’ or ‘downshifters’ searching for a more meaningful way of life away from global capitalism to sun-worshipping retirement migrants in tropical climates. The expanding debates about lifestyle migration and other forms of mobility related to long-term tourism prove this, and they have disembogued in a multi-layered research field which is inspired by and rooted in different approaches from Social Anthropology, Sociology, Political Science, Tourism Studies, Urban Planning, and Human Geography – an interdisciplinary character which is mirrored in this volume.

In order to approach the subject of this book about Contested Spatialities, Lifestyle Migration and Residential Tourism more precisely, three preliminary remarks are required. First, we propose to consider lifestyle-oriented migration as a privileged form of mobility taking place in a contingent relation between the two poles of tourism and migration. Lifestyle migration is privileged, because it usually does not occur primarily for economic reasons. Lifestyle migrants predominantly belong to wealthy societies in the Western hemisphere, and they choose to relocate themselves partially or permanently in places with lower costs of living (often, but not necessarily located in lower-income countries), thus capitalising the multiple opportunities that the existing differences of purchase power and social and symbolical power relations facilitate in a globalised world. This implies also that lifestyle migrants possess a privileged citizenship status and express privileged ways of approaching local inhabitants, especially if they are compared with other migrant groups (Croucher 2009). Although often not a part of the economic and social elite of their home country (and sometimes even disfavoured parts of their society of origin), they usually live far above minimum and medium standards in the country they have decided to relocate to.

Second, we consider it crucial that, given their economic and social characteristics, lifestyle migrants have recently been targeted strategically to boost economic development in many countries around the world, particularly in Central America, Southeast Asia, South Africa and the Mediterranean. Especially if related to other politically desired mobile groups such as highly skilled migrants, ‘first-class’ tourists and transnational entrepreneurs, their relocation is likewise expected to produce a positive economic impact on the host society. Differently from most economic migrants, they are usually addressed within political discourses as highly welcome and respected newcomers which provide substantial returns for society.

Finally, it is also important to consider that leisure and lifestyle-oriented migrations and movements as rather new forms of global mobilities do not only include people, but also involve capital, objects, information, knowledge and cultures associated with this voluntary relocation (Janoschka 2009; cIntyre 2009).

This complexity has not been fully addressed in many of the studies which often primarily focus on the subjective dimensions and the individual self-fulfilment strategies of lifestyle migrants and their personal ideas and projections. In other words, much of the conducted research, financed by research societies located in the ‘Global North’ has explicitly focused on the manifold consequences lifestyle migration has for the people who are mobile. However, the voices of those who suffer the social and economic consequences of this mobility have been dramatically underrepresented so far. This absence of critical perspectives ‘from below’ is, on the one hand, a consequence of the post-colonial relations within the scientific community and the construction of the research field in terms of Bourdieu in which, as a hegemonic feature for excludes and silences systematically the perspectives enunciated from the margins of this field. On the other hand, most researchers from the Global North share with their research subjects the absence of necessary language skills to investigate the effects of lifestyle migration on local communities. Yet, it is more than interesting that they also widely lack a commitment to participative research methods which include the absent ‘others’ into their research design. As a consequence, the complex relation between individualisation, consumption and the transnational mobility of people and capital lying behind the phenomenon of lifestyle migration still offers important research gaps. For example, only a couple of critical studies have picked out the manifold conflictive dimensions of lifestyle mobilities and residential tourism as a key dimension for their analytical approach (Jackiewicz and Craine 2010; Janoschka 2010) – an important aspect that will be addressed in this volume.

For such a purpose, this introductory consideration will reflect critically upon some of the central sociological questions raised since the early days of the discipline, especially with regard to the structural forces of domination taking place in capitalist societies, as a part of how lifestyle migration has been constructed in scientific discourses so far. With regard to this, it is important to reconsider that approximately a century ago, Max Weber, one of the founding masters of sociology as a scientific discipline, illustrated that capitalism does not only imply a specific way of economic activity and social structuring, but also contributes decisively to the type, form and focus of modern life. In this reference to modern life he indubitably meant the ways and modalities of individual and collective conduct of life, or lifestyle as we would say today (Weber 2010). He further analysed that contemporary capitalism educates and produces economic subjects with an ‘appropriate’ conduct of life, professional ethics and, as one could add, consumer behaviour (Rosa 2012: 151). ‘Appropriate’ indicates here primarily the incorporated dispositions of habitus that stabilise, naturalise and legitimise the economic system itself. Stimulated by (neo-)liberal political and philosophical doctrines championing individual autonomy as the key ethical dimension of the ‘good life’, capitalism has since then produced a dense grid of discourses and practices that enhance individual freedoms and structure the public sphere in detriment of collective demands. However, it is commonly justified and authorised that the negotiations and definitions of the form and content of the ‘good life’ will intrinsically take place on the level of the individual subject. This statement is yet another expression of general trends towards individualisation and the desire for self-realisation which are consistently proclaimed and empirically observed in late-modern societies (Baumann 2000; Beck 2006). But within growth-orientated capitalist societies it is important to reckon that individualisation and self-realisation are not only a part of the freedoms granted to individuals, but also necessarily guaranteeing increased consumption of commodities and services, thus providing the internal stability of capitalism. Bringing together both observations, one can state that the individual construction of identity is commonly related to consumption habits which embody and express the individualisation of lifestyles. But within late capitalism, consumption does not exclusively mean the purchase of manufactured goods. It is also related to rather intangible services and, particularly in our case, to the consumption of produced places and natural landscapes. For instance, the popularity which mass tourism had reached, especially during the second half of the twentieth century, can be interpreted as an unequivocal sign of consumerism and individualisation, additionally paired with an increasing mobility of people and capital. In general terms, such paradigmatic shifts have recently been addressed in debates regarding the performativity of everyday mobility practices (Büscher and Urry 2009; Cresswell 2006). Embraced by what has been defined as the ‘mobility turn’ in Social Sciences (Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2007), these discussions claim that consumption, mobility and movement bring together powerful Western cultural narratives, communicating and appraising the multiple benefits of individualism. However, we shall not forget that tourism as well as residential tourism and lifestyle migration is often promoted by highly internationalised real estate business regularly exploiting the assets which such tropical paradises and other symbolically charged places and landscapes have, both for the ruling and subaltern classes of the countries dominating the contemporary world order. In many cases, this means that mobilities which are supposed to be an expression of individual desires are at the same time a central piece of capitalist strategies of asset exploitation, producing an extensive ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2005), especially among the ‘original’ inhabitants, occupants and users of the corresponding spaces and places. Such dispossession is usually widely assisted by liberal governments of the corresponding areas, not surprisingly and quite regularly resulting in the production of more or less virulent conflicts and processes of contention.

Within this introductory chapter, we will return shortly to this conflictive dimension of lifestyle migration and residential tourism – a facet that has been successfully omitted in many of the dominant debates within the research field. But before that, our aim is to better identify and shape the terminology applied in this volume. Hence, it seems important to address the notions of terms such as lifestyle migrations, amenity migration, residential tourism and second home development, which are being applied within rather disconnected fields and areas of research, while addressing a common phenomenon of social and spatial transformations that is taking place. In order to approach a common perspective, we can first state that lifestyle migration literally embodies important transformations related to scientific debates in fields like mobility, flexibility and individualisation. Among others, and as already sketched above, such changes respond to broader globalisation processes and simultaneously challenge conceptions of migration, tourism, culture, home, community and identity. In this regard, lifestyle migrants and leisure-oriented movers can be considered prototypes of how people organise their life in a postmodern or liquid world, thus challenging some, or even most of the common assumptions used in migration studies (Favell 2008), namely those based on the assumption that people only have one (or, exceptionally two) residential places (Borsdorf 2009). Possible reconsiderations include the critical engagement with certain terminological confusion which responds to the existing continuum between varying but interconnected forms of (spatial) mobility within the fields of tourism and migration (Williams and Hall 2002). For example, it has been addressed that concepts referring to ‘privilege’ and ‘elite’ somehow contribute to the conceptual marginalisation of the phenomenon (O'Reilly 2007). With regard to this, we acknowledge that a significant number of migrants are neither elite nor of a professional background but persons who may even move themselves in order to leave behind the constraints of social class (Oliver and O'Reilly 2010). Even though it is true that in the case of European destinations, the reference to ‘privilege’ and especially to ‘elite’ may be erroneous, the situation is different in many other parts of the world where declaring lifestyle migrants as rather privileged individuals in comparison to local standards may be adequate, as was mentioned earlier. Moreover, different concepts relating to the mobility-migration nexus from a perspective reinforcing tourism behaviour might also fall into a trap. Following Hall and Müller (2004), local population and local politicians may consider second home owners and residential tourists as outsiders and even invaders, with the consequence of them being systematically denied the rights of participation in political questions. Although they bring important investment to an area, and their lifestyle choice includes a long-term commitment to the place (Hall et al. 2009), they may even cause substantial resentment among the ‘native’ population, as has been reported repeatedly (McWatters 2009). Furthermore, the once prominent term ‘retirement migration’ does not resolve the stated problems either, as the concept itself fails at least in recognising two aspects: first, there are rising numbers of individuals and families of working age participating in the search for a better life (O'Reilly 2007). Second, many supposed migrants do not migrate permanently but can be considered rather as seasonal or temporary movers. And as such mobility patterns do not respond to the binary opposition between ‘migration’ and ‘residential stability’, it was recently proposed that they should better not be considered migrants at all (Janoschka 2009). Moreover, and although this does not necessarily mean mobility as a spatial attitude, many individuals conduct their own life somehow in between different but mutually entangled ‘worlds’ that represent meaningful cultural narratives (O'Reilly 2000). If we integrate in our analytical frame the transnational movements of ‘people, capital, information and objects associated with the process of voluntary relocation to places perceived as providing an enhanced or, at least, different lifestyle’ (McIntyre 2009), the widespread consequences of tourism- and lifestyle-oriented mobility, like questions of political participation and mobilisation in specific place-oriented struggles about local development, for example, can be analysed more holistically and within their specific socio-cultural contexts (Janoschka 2013).

The reference to lifestylemobility andmigrationmay offer an analytical strength in circumstances as given in many of the scenarios presented throughout this volume. In this regard, it aims at connecting some of the separate debates existing about the mentioned phenomenon, recognising the strengths of each of them: for instance, the debates in the heart of the discourse about amenity migration, especially prominent in the Americas, have produced a specific sensibility from a geographic and planning perspective that is committed with the sustainable development of local communities. On the other hand, discussions embedded in the field of residential tourism and second home developments raise questions towards the consequences that cities, villages, landscapes and places suffer if an important part of their constructed environment is empty during broader parts of the year. This relates directly to questions in the heart of tourism geographies which prominently discuss the seasonal uses of touristic infrastructure and the constraints that second home tourism development produces. Among others, the aim of this volume is to bring together and to foster a constructive dialogue between these dimensions. It departs from the conviction that such dialogue, as well as the inclusion of different authors and actors who are not related to the mentioned discourses at all, will produce important synergies and enable us to sharpen the key perspective of this volume, namely the question of how conflicts and contested spatialities are negotiated within destinations of lifestyle mobility.

This relates to the main research questions guiding this volume. Its main idea was based on a series of conference papers presented at the Second International-Workshop on LifestyleMigration and Residential Tourism, which was titled ‘The Contested Spatialities of Lifestyle Migration: Public policies, local democracy and global market forces’ and which was held during March 2011 in Madrid by the editors of this book. This international and at the same time transdisciplinary gathering focused mainly on the conflictive consequences and transformations that take place in destinations of lifestyle migration and residential tourism worldwide. Taking into consideration the previously mentioned research gaps within the contemporary scientific discourses, the aims of this volume as an output derived from debates that took place in the mentioned meeting can be subsumed as follows.

First, we aim at producing a nuanced vision that critically reflects upon the key transformations taking place in destinations of lifestyle migration and residential tourism around the world. In this regard, we feel that it is of major importance to include especially novel destinations in Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia, in order to de-centre a debate that is dominated by interpretations produced by scholars from and in the United States and Britain and rooted in their scientific perspectives.

This leads us to the second aim, which is intrinsically related to the hegemonic production of knowledge within the field of lifestyle migration. Here, our interest lies in providing alternative ways of how the field can be approached, especially if key perspectives of the Anglophone ‘Global North’ are considered and challenged. This is why we decisively attempted to introduce visions from Latin America, Southern Europe, Morocco and from other countries that are placed outside the hegemonic Anglophone-centred linguistic sphere. This proposition has not always been an easy undertaking, but it has permitted us to approach an extremely rich variety of perspectives providing novel insights into the contested spatialities of lifestyle migration and residential tourism – perspectives which are usually absent in most of the mainstream debates.

This relates to a third relevant issue, namely the critical approach that guides many of the texts presented here. In contrast to the hegemonic glorification of lifestyle migration inherent in broader...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contested Spatialities, Lifestyle Migration and Residential Tourism
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• 1 Contested spatialities of lifestyle migration: approaches and research questions
• Part I Conflicts and frictions in Paradise
• Part II Conceptual perspectives on lifestyle migration and residential tourism
• Part III Emerging geographies of lifestyle migration and residential tourism
• Part IV Epilogue
• Index