ARTICLE IN PRESS

Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 381386

www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud

Re-populating rural studies: Migrations, movements and mobilities

Paul Milbourne
School of City and Regional Planning, Cardiff University, Cardiff, UK

1. Changing narratives of rural population change

To understand mobility without recourse to representation on the one hand or the material corporeality on
the other is, I would argue, to miss the point(Cresswell,
2006, p. 4).
Country people are generally presumed to possess a
strong sense of community and a marked feeling of
belonging to their village or county. This may have been
generally true a century ago but a number of factors
have tended to modify the strength and direction of
these sentiments. Migration and greater mobility have
had much to do with thisy(Bracey, 1959, p. 43).
The changing composition of rural populations has long
represented a signicant research theme within rural
studies (see Vince, 1952). The existence of detailed
statistical information derived from national population
censuses, undertaken at regular intervals in most developed
countries, has allowed rural researchers to enumerate and
map the ows of people into and out of rural places, as well
as to chart the shifting demographic and socio-economic
proles of rural populations. Arguably, spatial analyses of
these ofcial population datasets have done much to shape
the dominant research agendas of rural population change
in these countries. In the UK and USA, for example,
research and policy attention for much of the 20th century
focused on the causes, characteristics and consequences of
net movements of people out of rural places as revealed by
the population censuses. Then, in the nal quarter of the
last century, these same sources of information began to
show new aggregate movements of people into rural areas
and research agendas subsequently shifted towards making
Tel.: +44 29 20 875791; fax: +44 29 20 874845.

E-mail address: milbournep@cardiff.ac.uk.

0743-0167/$ - see front matter r 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jrurstud.2007.04.002

sense of processes of rural in-migration, rural re-population and counter-urbanisation.

The last couple of decades have witnessed an impressive
range of publications on rural population change in
different countries, based on statistical investigations of
the shifting scales, socio-economic characteristics and
spatial distributions of demographic shifts, and placebased depth studies of the socio-cultural impacts of
population change. The fruits of these academic endeavours have been considerable, with recent publications
highlighting both the spatial and the socio-cultural complexities of demographic change in rural areas. Indeed, it is
clear that we now possess a much more sophisticated
understanding of the various contours of rural population
change than in previous decades, but, like Darren Smith
and some of the other contributors to this edition, I do
have concerns about recent trends in rural population
research and I want to use this commentary to discuss these
(Smith, 2007).
Rather than focusing on the detail of the individual
papers included within this edition, my intention in writing
this piece is to think critically about recent approaches to
rural population change. That said, I do want to use
material from the papers, and particularly Smiths editorial
introduction, to help develop my critique of rural population studies. The main body of the paper is divided into
four sections. In the rst I discuss Smiths critique of rural
population studies within a broader disciplinary and
geographical context. Second, I use the papers by Martin
Phillips and Keith Hoggart to talk about class-ications of
changing rural populations. I then consider some international dimensions of rural population change before
nishing with a discussion of the complexities of population movements and mobilities associated with rural
spaces.
Before moving on to the rst of these themes, though, it
is useful to refer back to the two quotations included at the

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P. Milbourne / Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 381386

start of the paper as they do provide an indication of my

broad direction of travel within the paper. Drawing on
recent writings on mobilities (Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2000;
Sheller and Urry, 2007), I want to suggest that researchers
of rural population change need to engage more critically
with discourses of mobilities, which involves them paying
greater attention to the inter-connected empirical realities,
representations and everyday practices of mobilities
(Cresswell, 2006) in different spatio-temporal contexts. As
Bracey notes in his discussion of rural de-population in
England in the 1950s, rural mobilities are more than just
movements between locations; they are bound up with
shifting meanings of rural places and ruralities. In this
commentary I want to consider rural population change
both in terms of meta-movements of people between urban
and rural locations, and in relation to complex mobilities
that are played out in different spatial and temporal
contexts.
2. Multiple engagements: re-connecting rural population
studies
In his introductory paper, Smith (2007) provides a broad
critique of the current state of rural population studies.
While acknowledging the value of recent accounts of rural
population change, he argues that rural researchers have
largely abandoned quantitative approaches to population
change, whether these involve spatial analyses of national
population datasets or specially commissioned surveys of
households in particular localities, replacing these with
place-based qualitative accounts of the socio-cultural
consequences of rural population change. For Smith, this
move towards the local and the specic presents a series of
dangers for the study of changing rural populations, the
most signicant of these being that rural researchers run
the risk of missing the bigger socio-spatial picture of
population change. What are needed to redress this
imbalance in rural population research, he suggests, are,
rst, an increased number of quantitative studies of
changing rural populations and, second, the development
of multi-method and theoretically hybrid approaches to
rural population change that are capable of situating the
local within broader socio-spatial contexts, sensitising
broad statistical analyses to the specicities of local spaces,
and introducing greater theoretical sophistication to
quantitative accounts of population change.
I very much agree with Smith about the need to combine
different methodological and theoretical approaches in
order to reveal the complexities of rural population change.
His points about recent trends within rural population
research, though, need to be qualied in relation to their
disciplinary and spatial specicities. While a footnote is
included that points to the narrowness of his critique, it is
clear that Smiths main arguments are based on a
particular part of rural studies, that of rural geography,
and one particular country, the UK. Within the context of
British rural geography, there is little doubt that recent

studies of rural population change have swung towards the

cultural, the local and the qualitative, and, in so doing,
have tended to neglect statistical narratives of population
shifts. However, it is difcult to highlight a similar trend in
other countries, such as the USA, where rural population
studies remains dominated by quantitative approaches,
often involving spatial analyses of meta-datasets undertaken by economists and sociologists as well as geographers. While this is not to deny that important
ethnographic accounts of changing rural populations and
places have also been produced in the USA (see, for
example, Fitchen, 1988; Duncan, 1999), it is difcult to
claim that there has been any signicant shift to the
cultural within US rural studies. What is apparent, in the
UK and elsewhere, though, is a polarisation of rural
population studies, with very few connections evident
between national statistical analyses of changing rural
populations and qualitative studies of their social, cultural
and economic impacts in particular rural places, and Smith
is right to call for greater integration of the these
approaches.
There is little doubt that the place-based qualitative
studies referred to by Smith have done much to develop
more sophisticated theoretical and detailed empirical
accounts of rural population change and its social and
cultural consequences. Drawing on the perspectives of
people moving living in rural places, these studies have
provided powerful critiques of dominant narratives of rural
population change based on local/incomer and insider/
outsider dualisms. Indeed, some of the most interesting,
informative and challenging publications on changing rural
populations have emerged from ethnographic studies of
rural places. I am thinking about the thick descriptions of
changing rural life provided by Bell (1994) in his study of
the English village of Childerley, by Cohen (1982) in his
detailed accounts of belonging and identity in the remoter
parts of rural Scotland, by some of the contributors to
Boyle and Halfacrees (1998) excellent edited text on rural
in-migration, and by Rees (1950) in his pioneering study of
rural community life in mid-Wales (see Rees, 1950). I am
also thinking about more recent texts, such as Pearsons
(2006) multi-layered auto-ethnographic study of rural life
in the English county of Lincolnshire, with in which he
inter-weaves narratives of performance, biography, memory and place.
If there are problems with these types of account of
(changing) rural populations then these relate less to the
nature of the studies per se and more to their interpretation
by others. As Hoggart (1997) has argued previously, and
also in his paper within this edition (Hoggart, 2007), rural
scholars have sometimes generalised about ndings from
place-based studies of population change without giving
sufcient attention to their socio-spatial specicities. Metanarratives of rural population change have become
dominant in the UK, based on lifestyle-led voluntary
movements of middle-class groups to rural areas and
associated socio-cultural and housing-related conicts and

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problems, which, it is suggested, are not supported by

broader statistical analyses of rural population change (see
Hoggart, 1997, 2007 and Phillips, 2007).
The problems raised by Smith and others about the
specicities of these place-based accounts of changing rural
populations could be overcome in several ways. Most
obvious, researchers could exercise greater care when
making assumptions about the generalities of population
change and its socio-cultural consequences from local
studies. Second, an increased number of local case-studies
focused on different dimensions of population change,
different social groups and different types of rural place
could enable researchers to talk with greater condence
about the generalities, as well as the specicities of change.
Third, and the strategy favoured by Smith, new theoretical
hybrids and multi-method approaches could be developed
that are better able to capture the different components of
rural population changeincluding the general and the
specic, the national and the local, the causal and the
consequential, and the structural and the experiential.
3. Class-ifying rural population change
Both Martin Phillips and Keith Hoggart raise important
issues in their papers about the changing class compositions of rural populations in the UK (Phillips, 2007;
Hoggart, 2007). Phillips uses new ofcial statistics on
socio-economic classication to show that previous accounts of the capture of rural space by middle-class groups
are based on an aggregate concept of the middle-classes
that obscures important differences in terms of the
statistical presence and socio-cultural impacts of different
middle-class fractions in different rural places. Hoggarts
paper focuses on a previously neglected aspect of rural
class analysis in the UK, that of movements of workingclass groups into and out of rural spaces. As he has done
before, Hoggart uses data from the population censuses
in this case on the changing presence of the working classes
in rural areasto critique dominant discourses of rural
class re-composition. His analysis of data for 1991 and
2001 demonstrates a steady presence of the working classes
in the English and Welsh countryside and positive net
movements of this class grouping to rural area across this
inter-censal period. For Hoggart, these ndings not only
complicate claims about middle-class capture of rural
space, but also highlight the abilities of the working classes
to devise strategies that enable them to remain rural and
local.
From the perspective of someone who has long been
interested in issues of rural poverty, it is pleasing to see
attention being directed towards the dynamics of the
working classes rural areas. I also feel that some of the
issues raised by Hoggarts paper are worthy of further
discussion. While his analysis does contradict certain
assumptions within the rural studies literature about the
forced displacement of working-class group from rural
areas, it also reinforces ndings from other qualitative

383

studies of poverty and homelessness in rural places, which

point to the complexity of movements of disadvantaged
people across rural (and urban) spaces (see Fitchen, 1994;
Milbourne, 2004; Cloke et al., 2003). While one strategy
devised by poor and homeless groups to deal with their
problems is to relocate to places that offer improved
employment, housing and welfare service opportunities,
these relocations tend to involve short distance moves up
the rural settlement hierarchy rather than moves to more
distant cities. Other studies of rural disadvantage also
highlight movements of low-income groups into rural
places. A survey of households in 12 areas of rural England
in the early 1990s, for example, revealed that one-fth of
recent in-movers were living on low-incomes (Cloke et al.,
1994). Studies of rural poverty in the USA indicate
signicant movements of low-income groups to persistently
poor rural places (see Fitchen, 1995; Tickamyer, 2006),
while Auclair and Vanoni (2003) point to government
initiatives in France that seek to re-locate socially excluded
groups from major cities to rural areas).
More recent evidence from the USA and the UK also
points to important movements of low-income migrant
worker groups to rural areas. Research in the UK, for
example, highlights that migrant workers from the Eastern
and Central European Accession States are increasingly
relocating to small towns and rural areas in the UK to take
up low-skill and low-wage employment (Wales Rural
Observatory, 2006; Commission for Rural Communities,
2007), and signicant movements of low-income Hispanic
groups to rural areas have been highlighted in the USA
(United States Department of Agriculture, 2005).
While the evidence presented by Hoggart and others
points to the complexities of movements associated with
working-class and low-income groups, we do need to
remain sensitive to more signicant processes of displacement operating in rural spaces. For example, the
paper by Maconachie and Binns (2007) in this edition
shows how entire rural communities in Sierra Leone have
been dis-placed by recent military conict. In addition,
others have discussed cultural and political conicts that
still surround the historical dis-placements of indigenous
peoples from rural parts of the USA (Geisler and George,
2006) and New Zealand (Kearns, 2006).
4. Broader geographies of rural population change
With the exception of one paper (Maconachie and
Binns), this special edition is dominated by northern
European case studies. While I would not want to deny
that there are differences between the UK, Ireland and the
Netherlands in relation to the physical and social attributes
of their rural spaces, it is clear that the case-studies
included within the papers cover a rather narrow range of
rural spaces and places. In this section of the paper I want
to discuss recent processes of rural population change in
broader geographical contexts, rst by reviewing evidence
of population change in other countries and then by

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considering some international dimensions of rural population change.

The focus on rural population growth and ows of
people into rural spaces appears much less convincing
when the focus is shifted away from the northern European
countries covered in this edition. In the USA, for example,
the latest ofcial statistics point to a slowing down of rural
population growth, with the rate of increase recorded by
rural areas between 2000 and 05 (2.2%) much lower than
the national average increase (5.3%) (United States
Department of Agriculture, 2007). In addition, within the
European Union, net rural population loss continues to
characterise many countries in the South, as well as the
accession countries in eastern and central Europe. If the
spatial boundaries of the discussion of rural population
change are broadened to include other countries in more
developed regions then population loss seems to represent
the dominant trend over recent decades and the predicted
trend for the immediate future. For example, a recent
report by the United Nations (2005) highlights that, in
aggregate terms, the number of people living in rural areas
in the more developed regions fell by 0.46% between 1950
and 1975 and by 0.42% between 1975 and 2005, and is
predicted to fall by a further 1.15% between 2005 and
2030. While questions may be asked about the exact
denitions of rural areas used in this report, the narrative
of rural population change that it provides does tend to cut
against that frequently presented within the covers of this
journal.
Reviewing recent publications of rural population
change in the more developed countries, it is also clear
that very little critical attention has been given to processes
of international migration impacting on rural areas. Two
forms of international migration are worthy of discussion
here. The rst relates to movements of low-income
migrants from other countries to work in low-wage sectors
of the rural economy. The agricultural and food processing
sectors have long depended on the in-movement of workers
from other places, but the signicance of foreign workers
within these sectors would seem to have increased in recent
years. In the USA, Hispanic groups have become a more
signicant migrant group, comprising one-quarter of all
rural population growth between 2000 and 2005 (United
States Department of Agriculture, 2005), with a growing
number of colonia communities evident in States bordering
Mexico (see Martinez et al., 1999). In addition, recent
research in the UK highlights increased numbers of lowincome workers from other European countries in particular rural regions, linked to the agricultural, food
processing and hospitality sectors (see Wales Rural
Observatory, 2006; Commission for Rural Communities,
2007). Clearly, these types of population movement are
associated less with lifestyle-based re-locations and rural
idylls, and more with economic migration, low-wage
economies and poverty, although their socio-cultural
impacts in particular rural places should not be underestimated.

A second form of international migration can be

identied in some northern European countries, such as
the UK, the Netherlands and Scandanavia, that is more
lifestyle based. In the UK, for example, the number of
people purchasing propertiesas permanent residences
and second homesin other European countries, particularly rural France and the coastal areas of Spain and its
islands, has increased signicantly in recent years, fuelled
by lower property prices and costs of living in these
countries, and the expansion of budget airlines. What is
evident in these countries is the creation of new forms of
international rural spaces, characterised by multiple
national identities and hybrid cultures, and while some
research has been undertaken on aspects of these international migrations (see Buller and Hoggart, 1994; OReilly,
2000) their increasing signicance, in statistical and cultural
terms, would appear to warrant further scrutiny by rural
researchers.
5. Rural migrations, movements and mobilities
Reviewing recent publications on rural population
change in different countries it is clear that the dominant
focus is on uni-directional flows of people to rural areas.
This is true of both national statistical analyses of
population data as well as place-based qualitative studies.
Indeed, it is somewhat ironic that those researchers who
have rejected quantitative approaches to rural population
change have themselves been seduced by the metanarratives of counterurbanisation derived from national
statistical analyses. However, aggregate statistics indicating
rural population growth and net movements of people
from urban to rural places mask a great deal of complexity
associated with movements between these places. In
particular, the focus on in-migration has deected attention away from important processes of out-movement that
continue to occur in many rural places. In the UK, for
example, rural re-population has not halted the ows of
people from the countryside that were discussed by Bracey
and others during the rst two-thirds of the 20th century.
In fact, recent migration statistics indicate that most rural
districts in the UK continue to be characterised by
signicant ows of young people out of their areas, with
levels of net-out-movement remaining broadly similar over
the last few decades. Given the continuation of population
out-migration, it is somewhat surprising that it has not
been researched more extensively in the UK. Indeed,
beyond the odd study (Stockdale, 2004) and passing
references in publications on poverty and social exclusion
in rural areas (Milbourne, 2004; Cloke et al., 1994, 2003;
Rugg and Jones, 1999), there has been a strange neglect of
population movements out of rural areas. While some of
this neglect results from methodological difculties associated with researching subjects who are no longer present
in rural places, it is clear that further research is required
on the persistence of out-migration amongst particular
groups and in particular places, and the roles of economic,

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housing and socio-cultural factors in inuencing these

movements.
Another feature of recent studies of rural population
change worthy of discussion is their treatment of the
temporal dimensions of movement. Rural population
researchers have been preoccupied with the present or the
recent past. Not only have in-movers generally been
thought about in terms of 5-and 10 year time-periods,
but longer-term narratives of rural population change and
changing rural places are often absent from rural population studies. Consequently, there has been little discussion
of the continuities, as well as discontinuities, between
contemporary and previous processes of population
change in rural places. There have also been assumptions
made about the permanency of rural migrations that need
to be challenged. As Ni Laoire (2007) points out in this
special edition, it is more appropriate to construct certain
types of migration as temporary re-locations, as particular
out-moving groups may return to their home areas at
future points. In addition, not all people moving to rural
places remain settled in these places. Indeed, it can be
suggested that the dominant experience of the rural is one
gained from eeting visits to or journeys through rural
spaces and places. Looked at like this, rural places become
meeting places for people at different stages of complex
journeys through time and spaceas set[s] of spaces where
ranges of relational networks and ows coalesce, interconnect and fragment (Urry, 2000, p. 140)and it would
be interesting to see some further biographical studies of
these ows, networks and journeys.
Rural population change is also associated with considerable spatial complexity. At the international level, depopulation would appear to be the dominant demographic
feature of rural areas in the more developed regions, while
within those countries witnessing aggregate population
growth, it is still possible to identify large expanses of rural
space, particularly in the remoter areas, that, in net terms,
continue to record population losses. Spatial complexity is
also evident in other ways. Rural researchers have been
preoccupied with longer distance movements and with
migrations from urban to rural places. While such movements provide an important research subject, particularly if
the objective is to identify differences, tensions and
conicts between new and established fractions of the
rural population, they do run the risk of marginalising
other types of movement. In statistical terms, short
distance re-locations are the most signicant type of
movement between places, as is demonstrated by Nigel
Walfords (2007) analysis of migration in rural Wales in
this edition, and so it is surprising that more has not been
said about these more local migrations. The research that
has been undertaken on this subject has illustrated some
interesting socio-cultural aspects of these movements,
particularly the difference that a few miles can make to
constructions of localness in the rural context.
Rural mobilities are also packed full of meanings and
ideologies. As Cresswell (2006) noted in the introduction to

385

this paper, mobilities involve representations as well as

material corporealities, with different forms of mobility
awarded different sets of meaning and degrees of acceptance in different places. As is obvious in Braceys
quotation that opened the paper, previous processes of
rural out-movement in the UK, and also in the USA,
tended to be discussed in emotive terms by many
researchers and policy-makers, as threatening local forms
of community living and the settledness of rural places.
Similar sentiments were expressed by Rees (1950) in his
classic study of a Welsh rural community in the immediate
post-war years, where he constructed increasing mobilities
associated with people, technologies and employment as
part of the modernist assault on rural areas. More recent
rural mobilities, involving population in-movements, have
been discussed in similar ways. Relatively little has been
said about the positive impacts of migrations to rural areas,
including the support provided for local services by new
groups and the increased cultural diversity that these
migrations bring to rural places not known for their
tolerance of cultural difference. Instead, the dominant
narrative of recent population change, in the UK at least,
has been much narrower and more negative, focusing on
the tensions, conicts and problems that follow from the
movement of outside groups into rural places. This has
been particularly true of recent studies that have explored
the in-movement of socially disadvantaged and culturally
marginalised groups in rural contexts, such as homeless
people and travellers, where these types of mobility are
culturally constructed as out of place in rural spaces (see
Cloke et al., 2000, 2001; Sibley, 1995; Davis, 1997). I
wonder whether our readings of these other incursions as
culture wars, though, have been too simplistic and
whether more longitudinal and ethnographic accounts of
these movements may demonstrate a more complex mix of
exclusions, indifferences and inclusions at play, as would
appear to be the case in Meijering et al.s (2007) study of
the Hobbitsee community in the Netherlands included in
this edition.
6. Towards new narratives of rural mobilities
Bringing the different dimensions of the paper together,
I feel that researchers of rural population change need to
think more critically about the broad range of movements
and mobilities that are being played out in rural spaces.
Recent studies have generally focused on uni-directional
movements, and particularly the ows of people into rural
areas. Rural population change, though, is much more
complicated than this, being composed of movements into,
out of, within and through rural places; journeys of a few
yards as well as those of many hundreds of miles; linear
ows between particular locations and more complex
spatial patterns of movement; stops of a few hours, days
or weeks as well as many decades; journeys of necessity and
choice; economic and lifestyle-based movements; hyperand im-mobilities; conicts and complementarities; and

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P. Milbourne / Journal of Rural Studies 23 (2007) 381386

uneven power relations and processes of marginalisation. It

is these different mobilities, present in different combinations in different places, that produce the complexities of
rural population change. Unravelling these complexities
will necessitate the employment of innovative theoretical
and methodological approaches to the mobilities of people
and places in rural areas. It will involve re-connections with
previous approaches to rural population change as well as
the development of new understandings of rural change
that reect shifting rural circumstances and theoretical
advances in other areas of the social sciences. It will involve
the application of theoretical frameworks devised by others
to rural mobilities and the development of new theoretical
approaches to mobilities derived from rural case studies.
Finally, it will involve more critical attention being given to
the different social, cultural, political and economic
dimensions of rural mobilities and their entanglements in
particular rural places.
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