Commercial Counterurbanisation: An Emerging Force in Rural Economic Development

By G. Bosworth. 2010

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

After rapid urban growth and industrialisation, the postwar era has seen counterurbanisation become a dominant demographic trend in the UK. Much has been written about the residential patterns of counterurbanisation, but the associated growth of rural business has attracted less attention. The author proposes the term ‘commercial counterurbanisation’ to describe the growth of rural economies stimulated by inward migration. In the North East of England, in-migrants own over half of rural microbusinesses, they are more growth-oriented, and they are responsible for considerably more employment than the whole of the agriculture sector. In arguing that commercial counterurbanisation is more than just a spatial decentralisation of business activity, the author explores the social as well as the economic motivations of ‘counterurbanising’ business owners. Commercial counterurbanisation can be a two-stage process, as the decision to work in a rural area or run a rural business may occur several years after a residential move. Where this time lag exists, in-migrant business owners will be influenced by different factors in different locations. In the context of neoendogenous development, the balance of local and extralocal forces is particularly significant. This leads to the conclusion that in-migrant business owners need to become embedded into the rural community for the wider rural economy to realise the maximum benefits from commercial counterurbanisation.

Subfields: Demography, General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/01442326b06253667b8e9436c6e9f79fcf774cbc

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In Demography

1. Tessa Conroy
2. M. Kures
3. S. Deller

In General Agricultural and Biological Sciences

1. Tessa Conroy
2. M. Kures
3. S. Deller

Citations in the corpus

• Rural entrepreneurship and migration (2019, background): “…introduced into the community including fresh ideas, connections to broader networks outside the community and approaches to thinking about community economic development, and in particular, business development and entrepreneurship (Akgün et al., 2011; Bosworth, 2010; Bosworth and Atterton, 2012).”