Staying Connected: Rural Stayers and 'Reverse' Place Elasticity

Tialda Haartsen , University Groningen
Aileen Stockdale, Queens University Belfast

The recent past has seen unprecedented growth in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and transportation. We can commute over considerable distances or work remotely from home and are able to physically and virtually visit co-workers, family and friends anywhere in the world. From a migration perspective, ICTs, especially online social media, have stretched place boundaries facilitating migration and enabling migrants to maintain place connections at greater distances. This has been termed 'place elasticity' by Barcus and Brunn (2010: 291) '...in essence living a virtual life in the [home or origin] community without being present' which lessens the loss of leaving. While place elasticity has been explored, this is almost always done from the migrants' perspective, in international migration patterns. This paper focuses on the stayers' perspective in an internal setting. Specifically, our interest is in how ‘staying connected’ to others living outside of the rural home area enables staying within this area. We term this 'reverse' place elasticity: by maintaining near-constant virtual (ICTs) and occasional physical (personal visits) connections to friends and relatives elsewhere, the world comes to the stayers enabling them to remain in place. These connections may lessen personal senses of 'feeling left behind'. This paper has a strong theoretical focus developing the concept of reverse place elasticity. It also starts to operationalise the concept via survey data of approximately 3000 rural stayers in the Netherlands, Germany and Northern Ireland, exploring to what extent possessing friends and relatives elsewhere makes it easier to stay in the home area.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 64. Flash Session: International and Internal Mobility