EXPLORING THE GEOGRAPHIES OF LIFESTYLE MOBILITY - Tourism Geographies - page 117

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EXPLORING THE GEOGRAPHIES
OF LIFESTYLE MOBILITY
Current and future fi elds of enquiry
Maria Casado-Diaz
The emergence of lifestyle migration
It has been argued that tourism constitutes a form of leisure-oriented mobility and as such, it
is both shaped by and contributes to the shaping of contemporary practices of consumption,
production and lifestyle (see Lew et al. , 2004). Tourism has signifi cantly infl uenced the
mapping of potential destinations for different forms of leisure-oriented mobility, such as
second home ownership, amenity-seeking seasonal migration or international retirement
migration (IRM), and has also contributed to the intensifi cation and diversifi cation of these
forms of contemporary mobility in recent decades.
An emerging thread of research on contemporary mobilities relates to lifestyle migration
and the search for a better quality of life . 1 Lifestyle migrants are often characterised as rela-
tively affl uent and geographically mobile individuals who relocate, on a seasonal or perma-
nent basis, to relatively less affl uent areas in search of a better lifestyle (see Benson and
O'Reilly, 2009a). Lifestyle migration can be conceptually framed within the New Mobility
Paradigm (Sheller and Urry, 2006; see also Duncan, Chapter 14 and Gale, Chapter 4 of this
volume). It encapsulates and discusses the implications and varied manifestations of leisure-
oriented mobility in contemporary societies, and research on this fi eld has explored the lives
and lifestyle choices of the migrants by focusing on the context and trajectories, the nexus
between tourism and seasonal and/or permanent migration, the motivations and determi-
nants of lifestyle migration, the migrants' experiences and everyday lives and the implications
for host and home communities. It also explores the importance of issues of gender, age,
place, identity, class, nation and community among these amenity-seeking migrants. Benson
and O'Reilly (2009a: 621) defi ne lifestyle migration as the migration of 'relatively affl uent
individuals, moving either part-time or full-time, permanently or temporarily, to places
which, for various reasons, signify for the migrants something loosely defi ned as quality of
life'. As argued by Benson and O'Reilly (2009a), lifestyle migration becomes the outcome of
the refl exive assessment of opportunities to embark on a different way of life and, as such, is
constrained by the habitus of the individual.
This fi eld of research has become a consolidated area of research in tourism geographies.
The geographies of lifestyle migration incorporate different forms of mobility such as IRM,
second-home ownership and residential tourism as well as other forms of lifestyle-oriented