“Find Your Nature” in the Swiss Alps In Search of a Better Life in the Mountains

Abstract

This paper reflects upon the nature/culture dichotomy while focusing on mountain landscapes understood as ideal places for a better life. Taking as example a region in the Swiss Alps, it analyses the motivations that lead mostly urban people to settle in mountain regions for the last three decades. Drawing on long-term multi-sited fieldworks in Swiss alpine villages, it highlights new forms of migration, not directly for economic reasons, as well as the representations of mountains as a trendy 'culturalised' natural place for living, especially for middle and upper urban classes. While giving voice to the research participants to understand the change in values and preferences towards mountain areas, this article enlightens the underlying factors behind amenity-led migration, lifestyle migration and multi-locality. It demonstrates how the nature/culture divide is being reshaped in the contemporary Swiss alpine context, where nature has become a cultural project.

Potential rebound effects of teleworking on residential and daily mobility

“…Teleworking can enable hypermobility or multi‐mobility, such as digital nomadism, as mentioned above. Increasingly since the pandemic, we have seen that telework and the digitalisation of less connected regions have inspired new economic opportunities related to teleworking and tourism (Boscoboinik & Cretton, 2017; Bürgin & Mayer, 2020). Hotels in mountainous regions, for example, have offered rooms for teleworkers, including a good internet connection and other important necessities.…”

“…As Ær⊘ (2006) argues, when one looks at residential choice through a lifestyle lens, it becomes evident that it is connected to taste and to certain norms that exist within social groups. Residential choice is also linked with trends in which perceptions of the environment and the valorisation of certain areas play into lifestyle choices and, by proxy, residential choice, resulting in amenity‐led or lifestyle migration (Boscoboinik & Cretton, 2017).…”

Permanent Impermanence in the Anthropocene. The emergence of a guest-worker society in a Patagonian Mountain village

“…Migration patterns emerging from seasonal tourism and the pursuit of happiness in the mountains have elsewhere been approached as amenities or lifestyle migration (see Bianchi, 2000;Boscoboinik and Cretton, 2017;Soronellas-Masdeu and Offenhenden 2022). This text engages debates on Anthropocene mobilities and critical urban studies to analyze patterns of im/mobilization in El Chaltén.…”

Two Close-to-Nature Lifestyles, One Benefit for the Cultural Landscape: Comparing Lifestyle Movers and Lifestyle Farmers in the Remote European Eastern Alps

“…Crosscurrents along the European Alpine arch are not solely economically driven, as illustrated by studies on amenity migration (Bender and Kanitscheider 2012;L€ offler et al 2016;Mayer and Meili 2016;Beismann et al 2022), lifestyle migration (Boscoboinik and Cretton 2017;Friedli and Boscoboinik 2023), as well as leisure migration and multilocality (Borsdorf 2013;Sonderegger and B€ atzing 2013;Perlik 2020;Bourdeau 2021). These studies address conscious, (semi)permanent relocation for a better way of life (cf Benson and Osbaldiston 2014) that is linked to tourism, leisure, and consumption (Torkington 2012) and thus to the concept of lifestyle mobility (McIntyre 2009;Casado-Diaz 2011;Cohen et al 2013).…”