Lifestyle migration and the (un)making of ideal home

Abstract

In an era of increasing mobility, more and more people choose to migrate elsewhere, not primarily for economic reasons but for a better quality of life in cultural tropes, giving rise to lifestyle migration. In pursuit of a better quality of life, lifestyle migrants often frame and even idealize their destinations as offering various possibilities to engage in individualistic ethos and self-expression. To capture this idealization of destinations, this article proposes the concept of ideal home to explain lifestyle migrants' desire for a better and more fulfilling way of life, especially in contrast to the one that they left behind. Using the example of Lijiang Old Town, China, the paper examines how a group of domestic lifestyle migrants negotiate for a homely life resulting from their conscious choice of an idealized lifestyle. Furthermore, it examines why these migrants make efforts to pursue a better quality of life in Lijiang, and explores the social and spatial strategies deployed by lifestyle migrants to maintain and experience ideal home in their everyday life. It finds that the politics of space plays a role in shaping their new home which is a site of exclusion and inclusion between migrants, tourist customers, and locals. We argue for the need to depart from an abstraction of romanticized and idealized destinations, and to delve into how life is actually experienced and negotiated, in order to unravel the simultaneity of belonging and alienation in destinations.