Counter urbanization

Counterurbanization, or de-urbanization, is a demographic and social process whereby people move from urban areas to rural areas. It is, like suburbanization, inversely related to urbanization. It first occurred as a reaction to inner-city deprivation More recent research has documented the social and political drivers of counterurbanization and its impacts in developing countries such as China, which are currently undergoing the process of mass urbanization. It is one of the causes that can lead to shrinking cities.

Counterurbanization is the process by which people migrate from urban to rural communities, the opposite of urbanization. People have moved from urban to rural communities for various reasons, including job opportunities and simpler lives. In recent years, due to technology, this process has been occurring in reverse. With new communications technology, people from rural communities can work from home because they can connect with each other via rural Internet, which means some employment opportunities no longer require moving to an urban community. Counterurbanization is about people being able to explore alternatives to living in the city, creating changes in living location preferences.

In past years, a multi-corporation business would use outsourcing by hiring workers in poorer countries for cheap labor. In more recent years, corporations have been using "rural sourcing which involves using small to medium sized town as a source of labor. This creates jobs in the country and also for rural communities so they do not need to move their entire family to a whole new setting and also reduces unnecessary expense for the companies. Most of the workers in these rural settings get paid less but have an option of either working from home or an office. If they were in an urban setting, the company would spend more money on an entirely new office for the urban based employees to work at.

In the past, the general migration trend in the United States has been from the east to the west. Art Hall, an executive director of the Centre for Applied Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business states "California has been losing people for at least a decade ... two patterns of migration are under way in California. People are leaving the coast and moving to the Northern interior. When they leave, they tend to go places like Arizona and Nevada. So it's not a far move. And they also are going up north to Seattle and Portland. Part of the answer there is that it's just very expensive to live on the California coast."

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Wikipedia