What is Rural Gentrification? Exclusionary Migration, Population Change, and Revalorised Housing Markets

摘要

Over the last four decades, the local population structures of many British rural places have been reconfigured in distinct ways, tied to broader changing socio-cultural and economic relations (Woods, 2007). Various factors have intersected to produce more homogenous rural population profiles of affluent households - dominated by in-migrant gentrifiers. As a result, some previously socially mixed rural communities have fragmented, as low-income households have been replaced by affluent households; the former unable to compete in revalorised, gentrified rural housing markets (Shucksmith, 1990). These trends of rural gentrification are now commonplace across much of rural Britain (Phillips, 2007; Smith, 2007a). One of the key factors has been the inter-linked recommodification and escalating costs of rural housing (Phillips, 2005), fuelled, in part, by the growing demands of affluent households for rural residence and counter-urban lifestyles (Champion, 2001, 2005), and, to a lesser extent, the purchasing of second homes/rural tourism (Gallent, 2009).