Dwelling habitus and urban out-migration in Denmark

Introduction

Throughout Western Europe, families with children leave inner cities for suburban areas, small towns or the countryside. Extensive empirical studies show that regional migration is related to age and the life course. Young people migrate the most, while those over the age of 30 are more rooted in residential terms (Fischer and Malmberg, 2001; Graversen et al., 1997; Lundholm et al., 2004). While young people are more likely to move to the cities, families with children and the elderly tend to migrate out of inner-city areas. Changes in life stages or critical life events, such as leaving the parental nest, getting married or divorced, having children or entering the labour market, are accompanied by changes in the needs of the individual, including housing needs (Andersen, 2010, 2011; Fischer and Malmberg, 2001). Studies of motives for moving generally cite family reasons and life-cycle changes as the most important (Andersen, 2010, 2011; Aner, 2009; Deding and Filges, 2004; Detang-Dessendre et al., 2002; Lundholm et al., 2004; Villa, 2000).

Copenhagen has seen a large number of families with children out-migrating from the inner city. A study from the period 1992–2002 shows that 29.4% of the households leaving inner Copenhagen were such families (Aner, 2009; Aner et al., 2009). This proportion is significantly higher than that for residents in inner Copenhagen, ¹ where 11.4% of households consist of families with children. In 66% of the moving households, the mean age of the adults was between 25 and 35, the age at which most Danish families are formed. Over the 10 years from 1992 to 2002, the majority of the moving families had only one child, and between 80% in 1992 and 90% in 2002 had children who had not yet started school (Aner, 2009; Aner et al., 2009). These numbers indicate that people take the decision to move in relation to significant moments in the process of family formation.

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, the objective is to explore why young families with children move out of Copenhagen, Denmark, by studying their motives and the formation of motives. Secondly, and in that connection, it is the objective to develop a better theoretical approach that provides for a more fruitful framework for studying migration processes with a focus on motives for moving and the choice of where to settle down.

Incomes and housing prices also influence this migration pattern. Throughout the 1990s and into the beginning of the 2000s, Danish housing prices were rising, especially in Copenhagen, as were the incomes of households leaving Copenhagen (Aner, 2009; Aner et al., 2009). These tendencies indicate that even middle- and high-income households could not afford adequate housing in Copenhagen and therefore settled elsewhere. The total income of a household also influences which area outside Copenhagen it moves to: for example, out-migrants’ income patterns are correlated with the variations in housing prices throughout Zealand and Lolland Falster ² (Aner et al., 2009). Middle-income families experience both possibilities and limitations in making decisions about where to live. This paper focuses on this group, its aim being to arrive at a better understanding on how moving families experience and manage these possibilities and constraints, and how such aspects influence their motives for moving.

Most studies of the motives for moving away from cities are inputs into discussions of the phenomenon of counter-urbanisation, their aim being to try and determine whether movements away from cities are part of a broader process of counter-urbanisation (i.e. Burnley et al., 1997; Halliday and Coombes, 1995; Heins, 2004; Jetzkowitz et al., 2007; Lindgren, 2003; Mitchell, 2004; Rivera, 2007). Therefore the roles that differences between city and countryside play in people’s motives for moving are central to many of these studies. An important input into this discussion is an article written by Clare J Mitchell (2004) in which she argues for greater attention to be paid to the relationship between everyday life and the motives for moving out of cities. She proposes three forms of counter-urbanisation, ex-urbanisation, displaced urbanisation and anti-urbanisation, each differentiated by the motivations of the migrating households. By ex-urbanisation, Mitchell refers to moves motivated by a desire to live in a non-urban area whilst maintaining a connection to the city (e.g. by working there). As Mitchell (2004: 23) puts it: “Although motivated to reside outside the metropolitan core, these ex-urban residents retained their ties to the city through the daily commute to work.” By displaced urbanisation, Mitchell refers to moves motivated mainly by better opportunities for housing or occupation. Unlike ex-urbanisation, the area is not important to the displaced urbanites: they move to whatever location provides their housing and occupational needs. By anti-urbanisation, Mitchell means moves motivated by the wish to live in a totally different area, sometimes including a change in life-style. Anti-urban motivations are characterised by a desire to escape crime, taxes, congestion and pollution, and anti-urbanites not only long to live in a rural environment, but also desire to work in a less concentrated setting.

Whilst Mitchell’s categories are valuable, some elements of her argument call for a deeper understanding. Firstly, the influence of life-cycles and incomes on regional migration patterns is relevant in understanding the motives for moving. Rivera (2007) and Rye (2011), among others, draw attention to both the enabling and the constraining characteristics of the structures in which motive formation takes place. In her study of moves out of cities in Spain, Rivera (2007) describes the feeling of being forced to move because of changes in stage of life, and of the limited opportunities in the housing market. Rye (2011) analyses relations between life-cycle movements and social capital, focusing on young people leaving the countryside for the city in Norway. These thoughts are also relevant in the study of young families leaving cities.

Secondly, the concepts of the city and the countryside, of the urban and the rural, play crucial roles in both Mitchell’s typology and in much of the literature on counter-urbanisation. However, it is still unclear how they are perceived by those leaving the city and what role they play in their motives for moving. In human geography there is a long tradition of studying attachment to and identity of places and these factors may be crucial to the motives for moving and the choice of where to settle down (Berg, 2007, 2009; Rye, 2006a, 2006b).

In order to analyse young urban families’ motives for moving out of Copenhagen, which is the aim of this paper, it is necessary to develop a comprehensive analytical framework enabling an illumination of relationships between socio-economic parameters, life-cycle, priorities of everyday life, attachment to places and the choice of where to live. Furthermore, the analytical frame must underpin how the enabling and constraining characteristics of both housing market and life-cycle movements influence motives for moving. In the following section such an analytical frame, including the concept of dwelling habitus, will be unfolded.

The paper draws on theories of Bourdieu and Giddens and combines them with a notion of place drawn from human geography. By applying this understanding to the study of middle-income families with children who have moved out of Copenhagen, it is shown how habitus and place, routines and reflexivity, opportunities and constraints, have formed their motives for moving.

The paper is divided into three sections. The first section suggests the value of using both Bourdieu’s concept of “habitus” and Gidden’s concept of “discursive consciousness” in analysing migration processes, and couples this with a notion of place drawn from human geography. The second section applies this theoretical framework to an analysis of young couples with children who have moved out of Copenhagen. The paper identifies two broad categories of motives for and experiences of moves away from the city: the anti-urban motive and the housing motive. The third section discusses and offers conclusions regarding the usefulness of the theoretical framework and relates the Danish findings to those of Mitchell and others.

Motives: dwelling habitus

This section develops on an understanding of the motives for moving based on theories of Bourdieu (1990, 1996, 2005a, 2005b) and Giddens (1984), combined with a notion of place drawn from human geography, and particularly the relationship between habitus, place and motives. This leads to a development of the concept “dwelling habitus”.

Motives for moving out of inner Copenhagen

In this section of the paper the analytical framework for understanding people’s motives for moving is applied to a case study of Danish middle-income families (with children) who have moved out of Copenhagen.

Two types of motives for moving when becoming a family with children

The following section presents two broad types of motive among young families who have moved out of inner Copenhagen: the housing motive and the anti-urban motive. These two types of motives are identified by applying the theoretical frame, developed above, to the interviews, the aim being to illustrate how differing dwelling habitus impacts migration motives. In connection to that, I would like to point out that it is not the ambition to discuss how different previous dwelling experiences create different individual habitus.

Becoming a family is a main reason for moving out of the city in both cases. However, different experiences of the coercive and optional aspects of the choice of where to settle down, different attachments to place, different definitions of what is a family-friendly dwelling and different priorities in everyday life are also at play. Some interviewees drew mainly on one of the motives, while others were influenced by both motives. Most of those interviewed described their decision to move sometimes as a positively chosen strategy and at other times as a necessary action. In this way, relocating out of Copenhagen is often accompanied by feelings of having to make compromises, ambivalence and contradictions.

The two types of motive are identified based on differences in the ways the interviewees perceive of a good childhood environment and the way they identify with urban as opposed to rural places. The link between habitus and place is relevant here. In the anti-urban motive, the ideal childhood environment is located outside the metropolitan area, and the decision to leave Copenhagen is justified by a wish for a non-urban environment. The interviewees who draw on this motive used the city less after they had children and perceived of it in a more negative way. They identify themselves with the “province” or the “rural” and sometimes describe their relocation as a home-coming. In the housing motive, the decision to leave Copenhagen is justified by changes in housing requirements because of family formation. To interviewees drawing mainly on this motive, a dwelling in the city would have been an opportunity if they could have afforded it. They do not experience significant changes in the way they use or perceive of the city, and they describe themselves as urbanites who have relocated outside Copenhagen for a while. When the movement is based on the housing motive, the latter is often accompanied by feelings of being forced out of the city.

These two types of motive are the extremes in a continuum of motives. In Figure 1, the different aspects of the two types of motive are represented schematically. In between the extremes come hybrids, compromises and ambivalences in the motives for and strategies of relocation.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Two types of motives.

In the following, the paper elaborates on the two types of motive by illustrating them with quotes from the interviews. Subsequently, nuances are developed in the way the interviewees often relate their movements to both motives while navigating and making compromises between different aspects of everyday life and preferences for housing and dwelling areas.

The anti-urban motive

Anne and Michael mainly explain their decision to move out of Copenhagen in relation to the anti-urban motive. At the time of the interview, it was approximately two years since they had relocated. They now live in a town 80 kilometres from Copenhagen in a charming old detached house. They have a child in day-care and they both commute to work. When they were asked why they wanted to move out of Copenhagen, Anne mainly focused on the values that she associates with a more rural environment:

It is some of those values that I wanted to pass on to my child. It was nature, air, space and a little community which is safe, and where you know your playmates and the parents of your playmates.

Anne’s ideal childhood environment is located out of the city. As is also apparent in other interviewees’ narratives of their move, Anne focuses not just on housing but also on a broader place where the surroundings play a crucial role. In this motive the move away from the city is closely related to a wish to get out of the city and settle down in a calm environment close to nature. When explaining the move with reference to this motive, those interviewed emphasise the differences between city and countryside. Their motives for moving are imbued with a discourse on the rural idyll and the dichotomy between city and countryside. Some of these discourses are similar to the discourses in the English literature on rural idylls (Halfacree, 1995; Phillips et al., 2001; Pratt, 1996), which are also found in motives for moving to the countryside in different Western European studies (e.g. Boyle and Halfacree, 1998; Van Dam et al., 2002), and have been related analytically to the discourse on what is a nice childhood environment (Valentine, 1997).

Most likely, interviewees who mainly based their moves on anti-urban motives referred to their childhood “place-memories” from outside the city in suburban, provincial or rural locations when they explained their decision on where to live with their own new families. Michael explains it this way:

And it is also because we do not have a frame of reference of what it is like to grow up in a courtyard in Copenhagen. You only have a filmic image of what that would be like: troublesome. They didn’t play softball. They couldn’t do that. […] Our frame of reference was our own childhood.

By referring to his childhood environment, Michael explains why he does not find the city a suitable environment for his children to grow up in. Anne likewise draws upon her childhood memories when explaining why it was so important to her to live outside the city with small children:

I know it sounds ridiculous, but all the smells in the garden. To walk around the neighbourhood at summertime, when the grass was newly cut, and you could hear people sitting in their gardens eating their dinner. That atmosphere, which is of course memories you have from your own childhood. I could not imagine not giving my child the same experiences, to have that opportunity. I couldn’t imagine growing up in the city and going to school there. Somehow it felt unsafe to me.

Anne and Michael associate the city and the province with youth and childhood, respectively. Both of them were highly satisfied with living in the city while they were young, but they experienced a change in the way they make use of and perceive of the city when they had their first child. Michael tells how he experienced the city in his early adolescence:

I think it also has something to do with your age. I was around 21 or 22 years old. Everything oozes with energy … the pulse is higher, and you think that Solrød and Køge [smaller towns in Zealand] are boring [and] provincial. What places! What hillbillies! We want to go where everything happens. It’s the metropolis and never sleeps, and everything you like is just around you. That was how I perceived of Copenhagen, as a very lively city. Suddenly, that was our new playground.

Then they had a child, and this changed their view of the city. Michael explains how the city lost some of its attraction when he got older:

I think it was a similar experience to when I moved into Copenhagen, and everyone moved in that direction. Everyone went to Copenhagen to study. Everyone was around. In the same way, the leaching started. […] When all of us lived there and were singles in the city in our small apartments. That was crazy. It was a fantastic universe. But that universe did not exist anymore. That universe collapsed or was replaced by something else. And then it was not so glamorous anymore to go to cafes and get drunk on Fridays. That is not much fun to do alone.

Anne’s view of the city also changed:

I think I was more of a chicken after I became a mother. I got more worried when I heard about robberies and assaults. Someone got robbed, and someone had been assaulted. And then they carried out an addict from the opposite staircase. Is this something I want my son to experience? I placed more attention on the negative side after I became a mother.

Anne and Michael, like other interviewees who related their move to the anti-urban motive, narrated their move as a kind of home-coming. The motives for moving were related to the country-like environments of their own childhoods. They described a sense of security and a feeling of “being at home” and “in one’s element”, even though the new place of residence was not necessarily the same location as their childhood home. In this way, it becomes clear that the dwelling habitus is a relevant concept in understanding the motives for moving. A routine-like practice is prevalent in this type of motive. As Giddens has pointed out, even when a critical situation, such as having children, ruptures everyday life, people base their practices on a kind of habit. In this motive, the rural and the urban are associated with different stages in life, and therefore the interviewees perceive the move out of the city as a natural thing to do. The optional and constraining aspects of the structures are in this way nuanced, since they do not refer only to objective structures such as the housing market, but also to place-memories, attachments to places and discourses on childhood environments, urban and rural, all together forming a dwelling habitus.

The housing motive

The housing motive is closely related to a desire for more family-suitable housing. Housing prices in Copenhagen are high compared to other parts of Denmark and thus restrict the ability of young middle-income families to buy an apartment or house there. Some of the families who moved associated family-suitable housing with a house with a garden. Others would have been satisfied with a larger apartment with a nice courtyard. However, common to those motivated by better housing is that they could not afford what they considered family-suitable housing in Copenhagen and therefore felt forced to leave the city.

Heidi and Simon mainly refer to the housing motive when telling their migration history. At the time of the interview, it was approximately one year since they had relocated. They now live on a small island, Moen, 120 kilometres away from Copenhagen in a small townhouse with an old garden full of fruit trees. They have a four-year-old child together. Simon has two older daughters from an earlier marriage, who live with their mother and occasionally come and stay at Heidi and Simon’s house at weekends. Simon works as a teacher at a nearby school, and Heidi is still looking for a new job. When they were asked why they wanted to move out of Copenhagen, they mainly focused on the apartment’s shortcomings and their irritations about it, as Heidi notes:

The apartment was crap for a family with children. There was one sink and it was in the kitchen. There was such a small cabinet toilet you back into, so our son was getting his baths in a tub on the floor. A very grey courtyard. I felt like, this is cool when you are young or if you are single…. If we could have changed to a four-room apartment, in which our son could have had his own room, and with a nice courtyard. That was my dream.

However, they could not (or would not) afford that. Aside from the apartment, Heidi and Simon did not have any problems about living in the city with children. To them, growing up in the city would support their children in becoming open-minded and tolerant people. Even after they had children, Simon considered the diversity to be a very positive character of the city:

When I mention diversity, I mean it positively. Lots of ethnic minorities. I think it is just fine that our son never has questioned the existence of Blacks, Chinese, Arabs – that there are many sorts of different people. And there were a lot of them close to where we lived. And our son found it natural. I like that. Down here it is different. People stare if they see a black man. I have seen it at the school. A guy walked by, and someone said: “God, have you seen that negro”. I felt I’d been thrust back thirty years.

In this way, Heidi and Simon do not associate city and countryside with youth and childhood, respectively, as did Anne and Michael: they perceive of their move out of Copenhagen as a practical solution to a housing problem. Furthermore, their relocation permits a form of everyday life where they can spend as much time with their child as they find ideal. They still identify with the city. Their experiences of where they have previously been living form their “dwelling habitus” and influence how they sense their new dwelling area. The close familiarity Heidi feels with the city gives her a sense of security, a feeling she has not yet found in the place they have moved to. This is illustrated in the following quote, in which she describes her relationships with Copenhagen and with Moen respectively:

Well, that is where I am from [Copenhagen]. The lakes. That is where I grew up. I know the city. I feel safe in the city. I feel more safe walking along Nørrebrogade [main street in the area of Copenhagen Heidi used to live in] at four in the morning, than I do at five in the afternoon at winter down here. Almost. I just know it. I knew all the backyards. It is a feeling of security in that respect. I have never imagined that I would move away. Never ever… Well, I think of this as… I do this for my children (laughs). And then at some point in time, I am fucking going home to the city.

As is the case with Heidi, others among those interviewed did not feel at home in their new dwelling area. Some of them spoke of themselves as “urbanites” who had left the city for a while, even though they had grown up outside Copenhagen. They perceived of themselves as “urbanites” who had been forced to leave Copenhagen because of the high housing costs, or who had decided to leave Copenhagen for a while to have an everyday life with enough time for the family. Because they had spent years in Copenhagen, they now identified with the city. In this way the sense of place is dynamic and changes over time.

Heidi and Simon, even though they felt they had been forced out of Copenhagen, explain their decision as a reflexively chosen strategy. In Simon’s words:

If we could have had a nice family-friendly apartment in Copenhagen without paying 5000 Euros per month, we would have preferred that. But one thing is being able to afford such an apartment, another is…. when you have children, most likely, you do not feel like working 40–45 hours per week. But you have to do that to afford a nice apartment in Copenhagen.

Their strategy is related to a deeper conviction about what is important in everyday life. Simon again:

Fortunately we do fully agree on that. We do not feel like having a great career. There are no big expensive cars outside our house. We do not dream of living in a great villa. […] I think there are other things to life… wealth is not about how much money you make. It is about how much you get out of what you’ve got. And how well you feel in everyday life.

In this way, the level of income is not only an externally defined category, which sets the limits and possibilities for families in the housing market. The level of income can also be influenced by an everyday life strategy in which time for family life is highly prioritised. In this respect, a move into a cheap house allows for a downgrading of one’s career and thus for enhancing family life. Simon and Heidi are very clear on their priorities in everyday lives. Others did find it hard to make the right compromise between careers, housing and family life. This was the case for Dorte. For her and her husband it was important to their well-being in everyday life to have an interesting job, and this made the compromise more difficult to make. In Dorte’s own words:

When you know the prices of the houses in the area you grew up in (60 kilometres southwest of Copenhagen), when you know what you can get for the money outside Copenhagen, then you start thinking about how much money you want to spend on housing. Sometimes it is hard earned money. How much of your income do you think it is fair to spend on housing? We found that a little difficult. What is important? Is it important to live close to Copenhagen if we work in Copenhagen? Are we going to work in Copenhagen? Or should we buy a much cheaper house further away from Copenhagen and start a new life there?

Dorte and her husband decided to move to Næstved, a town 80 kilometres out of Copenhagen. Dorte quit her job in Copenhagen and found a new one in Næstved, but her husband did not want to quit his job and commuted by train to Copenhagen every day.

The interviewees who are motivated to leave Copenhagen because of cheaper housing have a different perception of the ideal childhood environment than the anti-urban motivated interviewees. To the housing-motivated movers, city and countryside are not closely related to different stages in life, and they could imagine their children growing up in the city. Therefore, their movements were not based on the same kind of habitus as were those of the anti-urban movers. The narrations of the housing-motivated movers were therefore much more imbued with a feeling of being forced to leave the city, and their decision was presented as one of a number of reflexively decided strategies, including compromises between housing, housing prices, dwelling areas and everyday life.

City and province in the motives for moving

The housing and anti-urban motives illustrate different experiences of the move away from Copenhagen. They also illustrate that differences between city and province or between urban and rural areas are crucial to both motives. In their narrations of their moves away from Copenhagen, the interviewees draw on dichotomous representations and mentally defined boundaries between city and province or countryside. In these narrations the city is associated with asphalt, concrete, anonymity, insecurity and unpredictability, but also with diversity, pulse, live-ability, dynamism and political consciousness. The province and countryside, on the other hand, are associated not only with safety, grass, nature, local environment, peace and quiet, but also with narrow-mindedness, predictability and boredom.

To the interviewees, city and countryside are in different ways associated with different phases in life. Through life, they pick and choose from both by moving from the one place to the other. These elements in the narrations of moves away from the city indicate that, in the experiences of those who move, the differences between city and countryside play important roles and are reinforced and utilised. However, there are elements of the narrations that point in a different direction. Thus, the interviewees occasionally express ambivalences in the respective ways in which city and province are valued. At times, the diversity of the city is valued positively, at other times negatively, by the same person. Moreover, almost independently of which motive the interviewees draw on, it is common for their time in Copenhagen to have marked them. In their new living place, their urban background leads to a feeling of them being different from the “locals”, and therefore the newcomers from Copenhagen seek each other and create a “Copenhagen” community in the countryside. Even though they have moved out of Copenhagen, some of them try to maintain a relationship with the city by making use of the city’s cultural attractions. Thus, the newcomers achieve a foreseeable local environment, close to nature, by moving out of the city, and at the same time attempt to maintain their urban identity. In this way, they seek to combine rural and urban elements in their relationship with their new dwelling area. Thus, in the same way as city and countryside act as complementary elements in life, so they act as complementary elements in the interviewees’ sense of their new living place.

These interpretations of the tales of people relocating from Copenhagen illustrate that city and countryside should be understood as dynamic entities that can be used and combined in different ways. As Champion (2001) concluded at the beginning of the century, western societies have now developed into a situation where concepts such as urbanisation and counter-urbanisation describing unidirectional processes no longer apply. In the same vein, experiences of movements away from the city are complex, and ambivalences and combinations of rural and urban values interweave the motives.

Conclusion

A number of young couples decide to move out of European inner cities when they have children. The aim of this paper has been to come closer to an understanding of this seemingly natural process by developing a nuanced view of how the motives for moving are formed. The paper has developed this understanding by drawing on the theories of Bourdieu and Giddens and combining these with a notion of place drawn from human geography. A central concept for understanding motives for moving, the dwelling habitus, has been developed. Subsequently, this nuanced framework for understanding the formation of motives for young urban families to leave the city has been applied to a case study of middle-income families (with children) who have moved out of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Two types of motive for leaving the city have been identified, the housing motive and the anti-urban motive. Whereas the housing motive is related to changes in housing needs during family formation, and on the limited opportunities in the Copenhagen housing market, the anti-urban motive is based on a desire to bring up children in a non-urban environment that is closer to nature. The housing-motivated movers perceive of their moving as a necessity because of high housing prices, or as a compromise between housing needs and the ideal everyday life with children. Their housing needs could only be fulfilled in an area where housing prices were significantly lower than in Copenhagen because they did not want to spend more time making money. The anti-urban-motivated movers experience the move out of Copenhagen as an almost natural thing to do when they have children. They could not imagine their children growing up in the city, and their decision to move was therefore to a much lesser degree accompanied by a feeling of being forced to leave Copenhagen. While the housing-motivated movers feel they have been forced out of the city, the anti-urban-motivated movers experience moving as a positively chosen strategy. However, in between these two types of motive, there are combinations, ambivalences and compromises, and most of the interviewees did relate their moves to both types.

By applying a view of practice inspired by Bourdieu and Giddens to the analysis, a concept of motives in which both options and constraints are integral elements was developed. This concept of motives made it clear how not only objective structures, such as the housing market, but also subjective structures, such as individual experiences of previous living places, influenced motives and thereby the decision to move. The transformation from a young couple into a family with children was, for some of the interviewees, followed by an almost routinised practice, namely to move out of the city. Others were more marked by the time they had been living in Copenhagen and could easily imagine being a family in the city. For them it was their housing needs combined with the housing market that launched their decision to move. In practice, for most interviewees, the decision to move was influenced both by experiences and discourses, not necessarily in a conscious way, and by reflexively decided strategies in which the many different elements that influence family life were involved, such as housing needs, housing prices, priorities in everyday life, career and the local environment. Thus, motives are formed in an intermediate position between a routinised practice and a reflexively decided strategy.

In the theoretical framework of this paper, the concept habitus was combined with a notion of place drawn from human geography. In this way, a special emphasis was placed on the ways in which individuals’ identifications with and views of places are formed partly through individual experiences of different living places, and partly through more general discourses about more or less concrete places. The paper introduced the concept of a “dwelling habitus” to emphasise this, and this led on to a focus on place experiences and especially the interviewees’ views of the city and the countryside. By applying the concepts of place and dwelling habitus to the analysis, it became obvious that the interviewees’ motives for moving were imbued with a dichotomous perception of city versus countryside – and of the ideal childhood environment. In their motives for moving, differences between city and countryside did play a big role.

It is also noteworthy that the sense of place (here city and countryside) is dynamic and changes through life, for example, in relation to identity, stage of life and social position. For the anti-urban motivated movers the perceptions respectively of the city and of the countryside changed in relation to changes in the stage of life. For others, the time spent in Copenhagen meant that they now identified themselves intensely with the city, as well as perceiving of it as a nice childhood environment. The interviewees’ views of the city and the countryside were also at the present time characterised by ambivalence. Even though some of them felt that they had finally returned “home”, the same persons expressed a feeling of being “out of place”, and to seek out other newcomers from Copenhagen was a common practice for the interviewees.

These conclusions on the motives for leaving the city are compatible with the typology presented by Mitchell (2004). Firstly, both in her and in the present study, anti-urban motives are prevalent. Secondly are the motives I have identified as related to housing compatible with what Mitchell terms “displaced urbanites”, since the housing-motivated movers in the present study feel forced out of the city and to a certain degree try to maintain an urban life-style in their new dwelling area. Thirdly, my study reveals how decisions of where to settle down are taken as pragmatic compromises over housing dreams and the priorities of everyday life, and these dimensions of relocating out of the cities are related to what Mitchel terms “ex-urbanity”. However, the present study supplies Mitchell’s broad categories with some nuances. Firstly, it illustrates that moving out of inner cities is characterised by being in an intermediate position between forced and voluntary action. Secondly, it illustrates that these categories of motives are not clear cut, and that most of the out-movers experience ambivalence and have to make compromises to a greater or lesser extent. Thirdly, it illustrates how identifications with places are important to the experiences the out-movers have of their movement. Fourthly, it emphasises the importance of the life-cycle for the ways people sense different places, and therefore for their motives for moving (or staying). To the young families in this case study, becoming a family with children was entirely decisive in their decisions to move.

The concept of dwelling habitus offers a deeper understanding of relocations and the formation of motives for moving, an understanding that may be relevant to a broad range of migration analyses. The concept of dwelling habitus relates experiences, biography, sense of place and objective structures to motives for moving. It is important that the understanding of dwelling habitus does not become too static or deterministic. Many places may feel like home, and people’s senses of places change through life and from one situation to another. An increase in geographical mobility adds another aspect to the concept and underlines the necessity of perceiving the dwelling habitus as a dynamic concept, and to relate it to a reflexive and discursive practice.