1 March

What is often called a ‘tree change’ is more technically ‘rural gentrification’. For a while it gives an appearance of injecting dynamism back into regional communities. But it’s mostly people wanting a city lifestyle, but with far fewer people and less traffic. Eventually numbers create exactly what they were trying to escape, in the new location. Chasing a bucolic idyll, that is a fantasy and profoundly disrupts the places subject to it. Like tourism. They become theme parks for urban imaginations.