Counter-urbanisation and a Politics of Place: A Coastal Community in Cornwall and Rural Gentrification
Summary
Author: Joanie Willett
Key points
- Counterurbanisation and gentrification often are closely tied to each other.
- Counterurbanisation does not necessarily benefit local economies, but instead can lead to places becoming deskilled, and to loss of services and vital infrastructure.
- Communities need to have spaces where newer residents can learn about the locality, its histories, and all can share their experiences of living in the area.
Is counter-urbanisation – encouraging people from urban areas to relocate to rural places – an effective rural development strategy? From the case study of a small coastal community in Cornwall, we can see that whilst it might work for other regions, in Cornwall, it is more complicated. Inmigrants do not necessarily have ways to share their social and economic knowledges with local people and this can contribute to fragmented, rather than cohesive communities. The processes involved with counter-urbanisation are much more nuanced than simply injecting knowledge and skills into an underperforming area. Gentrification can go in tandem with counterurbanisation, and can make it harder for local people to live in the places in which they come from. Housing pressures can mean that locals move out of the community, hollowing out services and clubs, which then rely on community action in order to survive. Further, poor infrastructure rather than a lack of knowledge and skills, can make it more difficult for locals to use their own skill-sets and get good jobs. Sometimes highly skilled people are not able to access the kinds of work that they are qualified for, because of inadequate public transport.
This poses questions about what Cornwall is for the people that live here, and what kind of place we want Cornwall to be. For the participants in this study, whether Counterurbanisers, return migrants, or persons with a multi-generational history in the village, it was about negotiating and challenging different knowledges, stories, and histories. The community was both somewhere with a strong visitor economy, and a place with a rich history and national minority culture which often conflicts with the kinds of back-of-beyond and sleepy narratives traded by the visitor industry. But the interviews also show that these visitor and sleepy ideas can dominate local imaginaries.
Although some people knew of the more innovative and highly skilled industries in Cornwall more broadly, many felt disempowered by the belief that the visitor economy was all that there was moving forward into the future. This politics of place is a politics about how the community (and by extension, Cornwall) can adapt into the future. Clearly, the village will continue to evolve, but the challenge is to make sure that this is in ways in which it can remain as a liveable community and for this, sharing the different versions of people’s experience of Cornwall is important. This is where the local clubs seem to play a vital role as a space where different versions of the village can intersect, interact, share knowledges, navigate their differences and negotiate a shared future. Some clubs in particular become places where local meanings, history and heritage can be shared and re-made, and this feels like an important contribution – that communities experiencing large amounts of counterurbanisation can find ways to share their own experiences, values, and concerns about Cornwall, and the places in which they live.