Changing places: Life -style migration, refuge, and the quest for potential selves in the Midwest's post -industrial middle class.

Abstract

This project entails ethnographic research on a form of non-economic migration, life-style migration, to rapidly gentrifying lakeside communities of the Grand Traverse region of Northwest Lower Michigan. The purpose of this research is to understand impacts of post-industrial social and economic changes on how individuals and families imagine themselves and their communities and the choices people make about both where and how they live. Life-style migration is part of broader demographic trends toward deconcentration, which is differentiated here from ongoing suburbanization. Life-style migrants relocate beyond traditional centers of population and business based on personal considerations of quality of life. An increased desire for a sense of community among many Americans and an increasingly global economy that demands place-based economic competitiveness drives places to market themselves in new ways to attract and retain families. Many middle-class families are becoming sophisticated consumers of place where residential choice becomes part of a self-conscious construction of identity through life-style. Life-style migrants move away from crowded metropolitan areas, often leaving high paying jobs with big name companies. Pursuing personal images of the good life and seeking to find greater balance and integration across domains of work, family and community, life-style migrants attempt to feel greater personal control by breaking from lives that become incompatible with their sense of an inner, true self. Many life-style migrants describe feeling like refugees who cannot be at home in a corporate world of work based on new economy ideas of contingency and flexibility. Their personal accounts are compared to narratives of conversion and travel. Life-style migrants reveal how social and structural changes present not only challenges but also opportunities for redefining work and family arrangements while emphasizing personal well-being and fulfillment. For these migrants, relocation to places that are seen as supportive of new life-style choices is an essential part of a quest for redefinition. These places are imagined as providing refuge for personal growth. Examples from my work with life-style migrants show cases of successful struggles to let go of standard notions of success and start over, guided by a life-style commitment.