A review on rural gentrification—what happens when urban development migrates to the countryside?

Author: Giulia Gotti

There’s a dilemma in the creative crowd

In public discourse, when we talk about cultural and artistic initiatives happening in the city, there may be a ghost looming over. In economic terms, next to the positive impact of the arts and culture playing a pivotal role in revitalizing neighborhoods and attracting investment, the inclusivity remarking the ethics of this sector may be threatened by its contribution to the process of gentrification. The script is known: existing communities are displaced, changing the socio-economic fabric of a neighborhood. Besides the social injustice factor, there is the additional recoil on identity since the consequence is often the displacement of the very artists and cultural contributors who initially shaped what made the urban neighborhood's character “attractive” (even if a new study recently supported the opposite, that is what general literature agrees upon).?

And there is something new. Even though commonly depicted as an inherently urban phenomenon, since very recently gentrification is starting to be talked about also in rural areas. When we work with the culture-led regeneration of small and vulnerable communities, I will make the point that we need to critically engage with the external forces we are bringing to the place. Thinking along the Italian critical theorist Antonio Gramsci, one of the main intellectual voices of the past century: every cultural and artistic project must be thought of politically. This article will focus on the Western hemisphere and Europe: in a period where rural development programs in the EU are gaining more and more relevance and traction, innovation and rural growth are loaded ideas to use as mantras. How may the influx of cultural amenities and events contribute to rising property values, making it challenging for low-income residents to remain in the area? In the ever-present purpose of being “smart”, is there a chance for planners and policymakers to ensure the social sustainability of development initiatives? How does the face and spirit of urban gentrification change when transitioning to the countryside??

Gentrification: what is it, really

Nowadays, gentrification is arguably a well-known idea on the surface level; however, social processes can be difficult to grasp in their entirety. Already much has been written, but let’s give once again some precision to the concept: a neologism by Ruth Glass who will soon turn sixty, stemming from the transformation of 1960s London and still ever-present in the political debate of the Global North. When looking at the numbers, the search queries for the word in the past twenty years show an overwhelming presence in North America—a country well known for its embeddedness of social inequalities. And that makes a lot of sense because, indeed, it is the class struggle at the very core of the idea.?

In sociology, the definition of the process has been recognized as decaying working-class neighborhoods in the city center reclaimed through an influx of private capital; the renovation of the buildings and the pacification of the area is thus followed by the settlement of a new type of middle-class tenants - the new gentry, in fact. While the awareness of the phenomenon reached the policy-making level in many countries, which reacted by implementing some sort of measures to regulate inequalities, in an unregulated context the original inhabitants are "removed" (both in a broad and literal sense) and sent to more peripheral areas, causing a series of social injustices that have been spoken about ever since. See the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre and his famous idea of “Right To The City”, which inspired many social movements. “The gentrifiers” are of various nature (include state tenants, former owners, marginal gentrifiers, political capitalists, and institutional investors); instead of being focused on material resources, they are now chasing a sophisticated version of capital - made out of ideas, culture, and aesthetic value.?

Looking at gentrification may be done from the already mentioned point of view of demand or individual choices: that’s the standpoint of Sharon Zukin, one of the main research and activism voices on the topic. However, next to the individual choices, as in most phenomena, there is a systemic bottom line intertwined with real estate development where consumer taste for gentrified spaces is, instead of emerging, argued to be created and marketed, and depends on the alternatives offered by powerful capitalists who are primarily interested in producing the built environment from which they can extract the highest profit. An important note is that generally, in scholarship, gentrification is perceived critically: the exclusion and marginalization of communities vastly outweigh the economic benefits. In other words, the process could be imagined as a “byproduct” of liberal economic growth and development agenda - it can (and shall be) limited while inherently happening.

Urban-To-Rural: the Idyll, Tourism and Displacement in the “Reverse” Migration

I briefly mentioned how continuous new scholarship has developed a far more varied meaning of gentrification, linking it with broader global processes of spatial, economic, and social restructuring. Indeed, another version has arisen: the one that happens in non-urban areas, where city dwellers find “deals” on real estate in the country, and locals are priced out.?

Alongside the so-called ‘agricultural exodus’ from rural areas to cities that started during the Industrial Revolution, a counter-mobility began: starting from the French "return to the land" movement (May 1968) which spread across Europe as a whole, some European non-urban areas have indeed witnessed surprising changes in their populations in the last few decades. The emergence of ‘rural gentrification’ reflects the ‘reverse migration’ phenomena of urban professionals seeking refuge in rural areas - who can be seen, indeed, as a core target of rural development policies, especially with the rise of remote working and “workcations”. They bring in new capital and property values are driven up. A new discussion opens on the long-term effects of the socio-economic fabric of traditionally agrarian communities, which involves a paradox. Aspiring residents with less capital availability struggle or can’t manage to find housing anymore, even though most housing is empty all through the year; owners will keep it as a second home or rent it out in tourist season for a greater profit. There is a possible side conversation to open about how the idea of “displacement” may shapeshift in a rural context in connection to which is the most desirable living place: for many homeowners, it could be of little interest to live in a small village, and they would actually be glad to benefit from an inflated house price to have availability of capital to move closer to urban facilities. But for the sake of this article, I will rather keep the focus on describing the contextual forces shaping the social identity of these communities.

The rural gentrification process echoes the type of movement of the ‘lifestyle migrations’, described as the mobility of people of all ages who move permanently (or for long periods of time) to places that offer them what they consider “a better quality of life” - a pattern of value which emerged in research interviews. When it comes to permanent/semi-permanent migrations, quoting from one of the studies, the interviewees are “looking for a better quality of life and a calmer, less hectic pace to their daily routines”.? There is an analogy between this value-driven mobility and what happens in the urban environment, but the aesthetic value they are buying into is now transformed into the cultural construct of an “imaginary of rurality”. Research has been giving different names to the waves of people moving from cities to the country, all of which are permeated by the idea of the ‘rural idyll: these are the ‘amenity migrations’, the ‘simple lifestyle’, the movement for ‘voluntary simplicity’, or the ‘slow movement’. The problem of mobility connected to the rural idyll (a construct rooted in media representation) is awareness: it blinds to the problems of the rural areas and encourages an extractivist mentality of the non-urban as a place where to disengagedly enjoy one own’s gaze at the “Rural Other”. An element that plays a significant role also in tourism-driven rural gentrification—an emerging form of gentrification in which formerly declined villages are transformed into relatively affluent and exclusive areas through the development of leisure and tourism industries.

As much as it is hard to generalize rural territories because of their inherent diversity and unique circumstances, some traits might be shared: rural gentrification is often based on the background of rapid urbanization in the country, which contrasts with urban gentrification which typically occurs within already urbanized areas. A depopulation flux creates vacant spaces for rural gentrification to settle in, and the process is sometimes glorified: when the success indicators are based on new inhabitants and businesses, local mayors might face an uneasy choice in regulating growth.?

About this topic, there is an interesting book about the United States by Ryanne Pilgeram, who writes an anthropology of rural gentrification using as her example the small town of Dover, Idaho. It is a great resource to understand how working-class, single-industry communities wither and become vulnerable to the free-market forces. Dover had been a fishing site for the Kalispel people before the American expansion; then, as America expanded westward, land and resources were granted to oligarchs like the railroad companies, who then used "their" land to extract profit from the timber resources in areas like Dover. The town became then a wood mill to process the timber and timber products, but when the timber industry processed all that could be processed Dover's mill shut down, and the people working it were unemployed. The area then shifted to a site for recreation-based tourism and became a site for second homes and retirement homes, catering to the “amenity seekers” and leaving behind the families who found their identity in the dominant industries that preceded them.?

Cultural Spaces and Residents Have “A Solidarity of Interest”

I mentioned in the beginning how, in the context of the city, the presence of artists in these neighborhoods can draw capital into the area, which can contribute to gentrification. But the root of place breaking (I refer to an “opposite of placemaking”) is a political choice: “favoring the creation of wealth over the creation of the community”. As Moskowitz writes in ‘How to Kill a City’, gentrification works from the idea that capital and economic growth are more important than working-class people in cities, specifically that “people who are not profitable to a city are therefore not valuable to a city”. And thinking about artist-run spaces, we can feel a clash: they often engage in long-term collaboration with people from their neighborhoods, which can mitigate some of the problems associated with short-term projects and give residents a voice in decision-making processes. And there is more: since artist-run spaces can easily fall victim to gentrification themselves, they have a shared interest with their neighbors in resisting it, a "solidarity of interest" that can lead to political organizing against real estate speculation. The segregation induced by gentrification forces means that an area becomes inaccessible to large groups of potential residents—who keep the capital running but cannot live there themselves. And, in the tourism-led gentrification context, with the additional mockery of housing which remains empty while people remain on the outside.?

By working together with their neighbours, artist-run spaces can help to create structures for better co-existence and social cohesion. So, my conclusion is not “Don’t reverse migrate”, but quite the contrary.? The role of grassroots cultural initiatives and art becomes a cohesive factor in intervening directly in co-creating and shaping the imaginaries of gentrification (what Sara Shuman calls The Gentrification of the Mind). When working with a smaller community, the place-based methodologies are not just a nice-to-have, they are in fact necessary: if a group of ten artists moves to a village of 300, or 500 people, it creates an even bigger impact in the strata of the population. My invite is for awareness of one's own bias. Dreaming of radical futures, innovation, and rural growth can mean something powerful—the beauty of these buzzwords is that they can be filled with the meaning the reader wants, so why not try something different this time??

Various scholars have been working on rural gentrification. However, very little has been written about both lived experience and practitioners’ opinions.?

If the topic resonated, we would love to hear your story! For future editorial initiatives, we both welcome thoughts from professionals working with rural development as well as the personal stories of individuals.?

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