Rural futures? Mapping newcomers' hopes about potential resettlement in Canadian rural areas

Abstract

AbstractThe Canadian government recently launched initiatives to promote immigrant settlement outside of traditional gateway cities, in small towns and rural areas. These initiatives attempt to mitigate socio‐economic impacts of population decline, and address barriers to successful integration in urban areas. Drawing on the geographies of hope, this paper examines how newcomers navigate hopes as they imagine rural resettlement in Ontario. Based on focus groups with immigrants (n = 50), the findings suggest that newcomers' imagined rural futures are a dynamic and mobile process, shaped by competing hopes for a stable life. Rural imaginaries can sometimes provide a generative space to realize hopes and develop new future aspirations, other times they can constrain hopes for intergenerational futures. We contend that newcomer hopes arise in moments of relocation uncertainty, shaped by competing visions, interests, and priorities at individual and collective scales. Newcomers' expectations of rural futures are always enlivened with a sense of optimism for what has not yet become, but are equally replete with angst and anxiety for the future. This article concludes that future geographic research on migration‐hope‐place interactions, particularly in the health subfield, should engage constructions, experiences, and enactments of hope that mediate relocations and the policies governing them.