Urban Flight and Rural Rights in a Pandemic: Exploring Narratives of Place, Displacement, and “the Right to Be Rural” in the Context of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many preexisting challenges facing rural communities and brought tensions in rural–urban relations closer to the surface. This article offers an explorative contribution to discussions in critical geography by comparing media narratives surrounding urban flight to rural places during the COVID-19 pandemic. Comparing field sites in rural Michigan (United States), Ontario (Canada), and the “Atlantic bubble” (Canada), we use an emerging theorization of the “right to be rural” to explore how urban flight and rural displacement are tied to concepts of community, identity, and safety. This approach is grounded in the political economy of rurality and emphasizes the power relations, inequalities, and historical contingencies that structure the experiences of full-time and part-time rural residents during the pandemic. Our exploratory discussion surfaces critical tensions in the geographically and socioeconomically uneven implications of the pandemic, including the “anxious economic acquiescence” experienced in many tourism-dependent rural regions and both the “hard” and “soft” ways in which rural regions responded to increased demands for access. We argue that the political economy of rural–urban relations is critical to understanding the social processes that will shape the “right to be rural” during and after COVID-19.