‘Back to the village’: the model of urban outmigration in post-communist Romania

Abstract

The paper is based on the assumption that the ‘back-to-the-village’ movement is a spatial outcome of recent choices that people make in response to emerging social, political and economic changes of post-socialist cities. It examines the combined effect of counter and suburbanization processes on the redistribution patterns of population where the countryside ‘empowered’ by the land reform and the structural changes of urban economies explain the reversal of internal migration of population in search of social security and better livelihoods. Urban outmigration reflects the articulations between labour market, business dynamics, social exclusion, economic profile and urban function across the layers of the urban system. The findings pinpoint the main drivers of urban outmigration within the context of deindustrialization, de-urbanization and ‘ruralization’ of urban economies. While the urban outmigration shows that urban-rural dichotomy is deeply ‘blurred’ by the scale and nature of urban socio-economic transformations, interurban inequalities are growing and require specific policy interventions.