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Place-Based Identities and their Impact on Host Communities and Landscapes

At an individual level this work has identified the primary values people associate with second homes and amenity based migration. These include closeness to nature, refuge or oasis from the hectic modern world, and a sense of community and identity. At the same time multiple dwellings bring additional home maintenance obligations as well as a more fragmented lifestyle. Highly mobile amenity migrants also bring added expectations and demands regarding the management of nearby public wildlands including preferences that sometimes conflict with those of full-time residents.

On broader scale, this work points out the need to reassess basic assumptions, social practices, and institutions that are structured around the idea of a single residence. What is local citizenship and what does local participation mean, for example, in the face of modern mobility? What happens when most of the local tax revenues are generated by part-time residents who may or may not have local voting rights or an equal stake in local institutions such as schools? In the future, the changing nature of employment, retirement and lifestyles are likely to influence not only amenity migration, but residence patterns and participation in local affairs more generally. Thus, high levels of mobility directed at amenity rich places pose important challenges for managing the social, economic, and ecological sustainability of places as more people with more diverse ties to the landscape and community compete over the meaning and management of that place.

References

The following additional publications on multiple dwelling and amenity migration are available online:

Where heart and home reside: Changing constructions of home and identity. In Trends 2000: Shaping the Future (Sept. 17-20, 2000; pp. 392-403). Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, Dept. of Park, Recreation & Tourism Resources.

Leisure places and modernity: The use and meaning of recreational cottages in Norway and the USA. In D. Crouch (Ed.), Leisure/tourism geographies: Practices and geographical knowledge (pp. 214-230). London, UK: Routledge.

Back to the future? Tourism, place, and sustainability. In L. Andersson & T. Bloom (Eds.) Sustainability and Development: The Future of Small Society in a Dynamic Economy (Proceedings of the Karlstad International Seminar, May 12-14, 1997, pp. 359-370). Karlstad, Sweden: University of Karlstad, Regional Science Research Unit.