Lifestyle migration and the (un)making of ideal home. Issue 115 (October 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Zhang, Heqing; Su, Xiaobo
• Is Part Of: Geoforum. Issue 115(2020)
• Page Start: 111
• Page End: 119
• Publication Date: 2020-10
• Subjects: Lifestyle migration -- Tourism -- Ideal home -- China; Geography -- Periodicals; Human geography -- Periodicals; Regional planning -- Periodicals; Sciences de la terre -- Périodiques; Géographie -- Périodiques; Géographie humaine -- Périodiques; Aménagement du territoire -- Périodiques; Earth sciences; Geography; Human geography; Regional planning; Periodicals; Electronic journals; 304.205
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.07.001
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0016-7185

Abstract

Highlights: Lifestyle migration represents a privileged mode of mobility. This privilege is conditioned by economic and political factors in destinations. Migrants' new home is embedded in the simultaneity of alienation and belonging. A clear tension can be found between migrants and natives. Abstract: In an era of increasing mobility, more and more people choose to migrate elsewhere, not primarily for economic reasons but for a better quality of life in cultural tropes, giving rise to lifestyle migration. In pursuit of a better quality of life, lifestyle migrants often frame and even idealize their destinations as offering various possibilities to engage in individualistic ethos and self-expression. To capture this idealization of destinations, this article proposes the concept of ideal home to explain lifestyle migrants' desire for a better and more fulfilling way of life, especially in contrast to the one that they left behind. Using the example of Lijiang Old Town, China, the paper examines how a group of domestic lifestyle migrants negotiate for a homely life resulting from their conscious choice of an idealized lifestyle. Furthermore, it examines why these migrants make efforts to pursue a better quality of life in Lijiang, and explores the social and spatial strategies deployed by lifestyle migrants to maintain and experience ideal home in their everyday life. It finds that the politics of space plays a role in shaping their new home which is a site of exclusion and inclusion between migrants, tourist customers, and locals. We argue for the need to depart from an abstraction of romanticized and idealized destinations, and to delve into how life is actually experienced and negotiated, in order to unravel the simultaneity of belonging and alienation in destinations.