Place and Lifestyle Migration: The Discursive Construction of ‘Glocal’ Place-Identity

Abstract

International lifestyle migration is a rapidly growing worldwide phenomenon. Within Europe, increasingly large numbers of northern Europeans are moving south in search of what they perceive as a better quality of life. The typical representation of this form of migration suggests that it is consumption-led, tourism-related and leisure-based; it is to be located within late modern, global, elitist, borderless and highly mobile social practices. The question arises as to the role of local place in this type of migration process and in the construction of individual and collective social identities. Using data from advertising texts produced by a residential-tourism resort and from indepth interviews with British residents in the Golden Triangle area of the Algarve, Portugal, this article explores the relationships between discourse, identity, g/local place and lifestyle migration.

Keywords:

• Algarve
• lifestyle migration
• tourism
• place-identity
• glocalization
• place branding

Notes

1. ‘Integrated resorts’ are resorts developed and marketed for both tourist and residential purposes, with facilities such as golf courses and spas. ‘Residential tourism’ in such resorts is named as one of the 10 strategic products for the development of tourism in Portugal, according to the Portuguese National Strategic Plan for Tourism (Turismo de Portugal, 2007)

2. The data come from a larger corpus collected for doctoral research (cf. Torkington, 2011)

3. Information taken from http://ukinportugal.fco.gov.uk/en (accessed 21 April 2009).

4. The south of Portugal was ruled by North African Muslims for around 500 years, from the eighth century to thirteenth century.

5. Goa was colonized by the Portuguese from the early sixteenth century. Algarvian ports were linked to the East by the Portuguese sea trading routes of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

6. ‘Timeless’: Vale do Lobo Real Estate brochure [original in English]. Available at www.valedolobo.com (accessed 16 July 2009).

7. Incidentally, there are a growing number of integrated resorts in the Algarve that are being named with a blend of Portuguese and the English word village (for example, Areias Village, Colina Village, Alma Verde Village). This is a further dimension of the discursive construction of a glocalized identity, since the local language is combined with the ‘global’ language of English.

8. The linguistic landscape is comprised of language in its written form, in the public sphere that is potentially visible to all (Gorter, 2006).

9. The word ‘location’ has a potentially strong resonance with ‘lifestyle’ for the British due to the popular lifestyle television series Location, Location, Location, in which ‘property experts’ help members of the public find their ‘dream home’.

10. www.valedolobo.com (accessed 20 November 2009)

11. All names have been changed.

12. A transcription key is provided in the Appendix. In this and all subsequent data extracts, ‘K’ is the interviewer.