Abstract
The essays in Global Amenity Migration: Transforming Rural Culture, Economy & Landscape collectively provide a comprehensive overview of the ways in which the attraction of rural areas draws migrants for residency with the goal of improvement in quality of life. The editors have collected a volume of true geographic, demographic, and economic diversity. This diversity is essential to contextualize the largely noneconomic motivations for amenity migration (although there are certainly economic elements in how individuals allocate time and resources for moving and settlement). The book is intended as a survey of recent scholarly work in the field of amenity migration for a diverse audience of those interested in planning scholarship.
Planning is at once a straightforward and an extremely complex field. It is straightforward in the sense that it details and deals with the most basic human questions arising from living in modern society: how to use and allocate space, resources, labor, and time. This is understood to be under the larger purview of policy management at the local, subnational, national, and international levels. The field of planning is extraordinarily complex in the sense that it touches every other conceivable field: engineering, politics, economics, health, architecture, real estate, and a multitude of others. Amenity migration fits into this more complex frame very easily. As a topical area that asks the questions of how and why individuals move to largely nonurbanized locations to improve quality of life, amenity migration is an unavoidable feature of the modern age. Some speak of a dissatisfaction with the trappings of modern, compressed (in the physical and sociomental sense) society; amenity migration can be understood as a response to this disenchantment with the hum of city life. This topic is all the more relevant for planning scholarship because the conventional notion of human migration, at least in the popular conception, is the opposite. Urbanization, if not density, is nowadays presented as certainly the trend in both developed and developing societies. The rural frontiers in the aggregate may no longer be the abode of long-term globalized competitive employment; seen as provincial, they are abandoned for the promises of the city. Yet this important book tells an important story about those who have reached an opposite conclusion or who have at least seen the dark undercurrent of poverty, crime, mass gentrification, and lack of affordable housing (along with a litany of other issues) in modern urban life. Understanding this countercurrent will be essential for planners in rural areas because the psychosocial perception of the regions has changed. Rural areas of serene beauty, often isolated and underdeveloped, are now prime real estate for a host of individuals seeking fulfillment. As the authors convincingly argue in their excellent introduction, if the trends of recent years continue, then amenity migration will only continue to increase. This book, correctly presented as a comprehensive report on current research and observed trends in worldwide amenity-driven migration, provides essential context and discussion about an essential field in planning scholarship.
As both one of the editors and the author of a theoretical framing essay at the beginning of the book, Moss provides a thorough and informative description of the practical and abstract issues at stake as the notion of amenity migration has emerged as a field of critical focus in the previous few decades. In particular, his delineation of the four primary factors associated with the impact of a neoliberal political economy (facilitators, motivators, spatial zones, and impacts) are particularly helpful. Such breakdowns are especially useful for nonacademics and those residents possibly interested in pursuing a move to a rural area themselves.
One of the book’s strengths is the range of methodological, conceptual, and geographic constructs under consideration. Organizationally, however, there are several practical and higher-order issues that arise with the specific ordering and categorization. The essays are broken up into three distinct parts. Part 1 (Strategic Concepts and Conditions) contains essays that establish baseline terminology while exploring non-geography-specific implications. Part 2 (Learning from Local and Regional Experience) is divided into two subsections: “Deepening Understanding in Wealthier Societies” includes essays about the wealthy countries of the United States and those in Western Europe, while “An Increasing Global Presence” has essays that look at poorer and less studied countries throughout the rest of the world. Part 3 (Planning for Sustainability) includes only one essay; it is about the role of sustainability in an era of globalization and environmental degradation. This breakdown, while explicated and defended in the introduction, artificially divides the subject matters of the essays and in fact reinforces the differentiation between “wealthy” and “poor” that the authors are presumably trying to overcome by noting the global and universal nature of the phenomenon. Perhaps the structural division was unavoidable by definition, since the book as an edited volume of collected essays rather than a uniform stand-alone work must contain competing and differing perspectives. But the sheer amount of information being presented means that in theory there is ample room for tension; a more daring organizational approach might have been to put essays that offer starkly opposite conclusions in proximity or perhaps highlight the disparities in literature between wealthy and nonwealthy countries in a more comparative fashion. In all of this, part 3’s having only one essay stands out as an aberration; perhaps the essay could have been moved to part 1 or reformulated/recategorized in some fashion. A single-essay category seems unmerited, especially given the intersectionality of the issue of sustainability with the challenges many rural areas face in minimizing or combating emerging industrial exploitation. Having only three top-level categories implies that each categorization is solid and uniform, and a close examination of the essays’ content in fact shows significant overlap. This is not to say, of course, that the essays themselves do not inform scholarship around planning; rather, it is to suggest that a complete reformulation of the organization of the book would flesh out nuance, insights, and ideological tension in a way that the current arrangement simply does not.
With planning as a subject, spatial analysis is of utmost importance. It is to the editors’ credit that the essays selected for inclusion all include photographs, figures, and charts that enhance understanding, provide clear examples of the points under discussion, set up conceptual frameworks that are applied throughout the essay, and drive home the nature of the migratory localities under discussion. Visual depiction is particularly appropriate and useful for this field because of the importance of illustrating and illuminating the physical constraints and tensions in the built and unbuilt environment. This extends from depictions of stunning natural rural scenery and scenic small towns to maps and charts that depict everything from topographical survey responses to color-coded density illustration and analysis of foreign real estate purchases. All of the essays selected for inclusion in this book have an incredible amount of data backing up their conclusions and claims, a fact that only enhances the authors’ research credibility.
In terms of the book’s overall contribution to planning scholarship, the essays within variably either provide a new framing of an existing scholarly question or advance new understandings through novel case study research. Both approaches offer utility to future scholars, academics, and researchers and in turn are valuable (as the book exhorts on its back cover) to those individuals actively considering or involved in amenity migration themselves. Three related factors are present in all of the essays that merit this labeling of topical area importance. First, each essay uses existing citations and research as a foundation for broader conclusions; this precludes the common trap in research of advancing claims without building on or acknowledging previous work. This is especially appropriate in the field of planning, since by definition it is highly interdisciplinary and draws on a range of topics in the social sciences, policy management, demography, and economic analysis. Second, each essay follows an intelligible and consistent pattern of introducing a relevant issue in planning (whether specific to a certain local rural geography or not), identifying relevant practical considerations (such as surveys, interactions with residents, local histories that were attractive for migrants, and features of the local built and natural environments that interacted), and interpreting the results of observations and data in such a way that immediate conclusions can be drawn while allowing for the possibility of substantive future research. Third, each essay is tightly plotted and defined, with little to no wasted or misallocated space. This is important, especially for this field, because the interdisciplinary and far-ranging nature of this field can often lead to excessive meandering or too much unwarranted detail. These are essays selected for this rigor, parsimony, and intellectual curiosity, all of which are extremely valuable for a collected anthology such as this. As previously discussed, the organization of these essays could be improved, but in terms of advancing the field of planning, the essays themselves are top tier and should be viewed as models of scholarship for current and future practitioners in the academy.