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The article is based on qualitative interviews with lifestyle migrants from North America to Cuenca, Ecuador. It attempts to further the understanding of transnational migration scholars of the structural contexts that influence lifestyle migration decisions and agency. In 2009, Cuenca was selected by international lifestyle marketer International Living as the best retirement destination in the world, largely based on a methodology that privileges low real estate and living costs. Since then, perhaps as many as 5000 North Americans have moved to the city. North Americans in Cuenca report economic motivation as a major reason for their move, and report making those decisions against a backdrop of economic and financial insecurity. The article argues that they are economic migrants, even as their relatively higher spending power has economic consequences for receiving communities like Cuenca.

This introduction to the special issue introduces the contributors’ articles and identifies key themes relating to how increased transnational mobility has affected urbanisation processes in many cities, resulting in the globalisation of rent gaps. A mix of local and transnational real estate interests work to attract higher-income lifestyle migrants and tourists, often from higher-income countries to lower-income urban space in order to increase its exchange value. In the process, however, they act to reduce the use value of urban space to lower-income residents. The introduction notes that the acceleration of lifestyle mobilities moving through urban spaces, and the development of transnational lifestyles of urban place consumption, have produced new forms of gentrification – not merely the spread of an urban strategy to new cities, but the planetarisation of rent gaps. Transnational gentrification is the form of contemporary urbanisation that occurs as a result of closing these rent gaps through attraction of higher income, transnational migrants, often from high-income countries in Northern Europe and North America.

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The article analyses heritage conservation and urban upgrading in Cuenca, Ecuador, in order to reflect on global inequality and rights to the city at the crossroads of transnational lifestyle mobilities and the globalisation of real estate markets. Processes of gentrification in Cuenca reproduce colonial social relations and marginalise the popular economic activities of informal vendors. Under the auspices of UNESCO World Heritage designation, the Inter-American Development Bank and successive municipal governments have sought to increase property values in the historic El Centro neighbourhood. Rather than relying on a local middle-class return to the city, heritage urban upgrading in Cuenca is dependent on higher-income global middle classes attracted to the city’s historic urbanism. The subsequent higher-income appropriation of urban improvements takes the form of dispossession of use and exchange values of lower-income groups, especially of informal vendors.