ABSTRACT This article examines how medium‐term temporary dwellers—who have been living in a city for months or a few years without planning to settle in the long term—impact upon intra‐urban residential mobility and sociospatial inequalities in Southern European contexts. Building on debates on residential mobility, (im)mobilities and temporary urban populations, the paper argues that these groups should be treated as a distinct and influential mobility actor. Empirically, the study draws on original mixed‐methods evidence from Rome, combining a survey and follow‐up interviews to link motivations for arrival, housing practices, and intra‐urban relocations. Rome is discussed as a relevant Southern European case where post‐crisis housing‐market restructuring, uneven accessibility and the expansion of platform‐mediated rental circuits intensify competition for centrally located housing. The findings show that temporary dwellers' residential movements and strategies contribute to neighbourhood change and can reinforce displacement pressures and unequal access to central and semi‐central areas, thereby shaping broader patterns of residential mobility for the overall resident population.
ABSTRACT China has substantially reformed its medical insurance system to enable direct cross‐regional settlement of medical expenses since the late 2000s, yet little is known about how different forms of medical insurance participation—local enrollment vs. cross‐regional portability—differentially shape older migrants' settlement intentions. To address this gap, using nationally representative survey data on 5002 older migrants who have reached the statutory retirement age, this study examines how public healthcare service utilization influences older migrants' settlement intentions in China. Public healthcare service utilization is measured using four indicators: participation in destination‐based medical insurance, participation in origin‐based medical insurance with direct settlement at the destination, establishment of a local resident health record, and participation in health education activities. Multinomial probit models are used to account for the categorical nature of settlement intentions: no intention, short‐term intentions, and long‐term intentions. Model results show that older migrants enrolled in destination‐based medical insurance are more likely to express long‐term settlement intentions, whereas those relying on origin‐based insurance with cross‐regional settlement tend to exhibit short‐term intentions. In addition, older migrants who have established a local resident health record are more likely to express long‐term settlement intentions. Furthermore, origin–destination disparities in the quantity and quality of medical service provision significantly moderate the association between medical insurance participation and older migrants' settlement intentions. Our findings advance understanding of older migrants' settlement intentions by revealing the divergent effects of local enrollment and cross‐regional portability on long‐term vs. short‐term settlement, and by highlighting the moderating role of origin–destination disparities in medical service provision, with implications for deepening cross‐regional settlement reforms to better facilitate the long‐term urban integration of older migrants.
ABSTRACT What motivates rural migrant delivery riders in China to work very long hours, and how are they managed by their working platforms? This paper investigates the motivations of rural migrant riders in Shanghai to engage in continuous work and examines the management strategies employed by their platforms. Drawing on participant observation and interviews with rural migrant riders working for the two largest on‐demand food delivery platforms in China, this paper finds that gamified algorithmic controls incentivize riders' labour. Driven by strict working performance assessment, Shanghai riders are attracted by three types of games: the everyday game of assessing work performance, the game played with their working platforms and the game played among riders. Building on these findings, this article identifies three defining features that condition consent from workers within the platform labour regime: its temporal fragmentation, informational asymmetry and hyper‐individualization. The gamification process ultimately aligns with broader trends of datafication within the online food delivery sector. These findings contribute to understandings of labour games in platform economies and offer insights into the emergence of ‘sticky labour’ in exploitative working environments. In doing so, it underscores the contingent, situated nature of labour motivation in the platform economy and extends Burawoy's analysis to digital labour regimes.
ABSTRACT While migration for ‘love in destinations’ has gained attention, the link between partnerships, beyond the married‐unmarried dichotomy, in home societies and migration intentions remains underexplored. Meanwhile, economies in the Global South are becoming attractive for talent, yet little is known about intentions of workers to migrate within this region. This study analyzes how marital status and cohabitation relate to Hong Kong workers’ intentions to move to less developed Mainland Chinese cities. Using survey data, it compares short‐term (within 5 years) and long‐term migration intentions across single, partnered non‐cohabiting, cohabiting and married workers. Short‐term intentions are higher among married or cohabiting men than single men. Long‐term intentions are stronger among married than single women. Family presence moderates these associations. Workers with non‐cohabitating partners do not differ from single counterparts. Findings highlighted the role of partnerships and living arrangements on migration intentions and contributed novel insights for theorizing educated migration.
ABSTRACT Internal migration in agrarian economies is usually framed as a rural‐to‐urban transition, but population redistribution follows multiple pathways. Household assets such as land and housing shape these moves, and how they do so is contested: some research finds that assets anchor households in place, while other work finds that they enable movement. This debate has centred on rural‐to‐urban flows in settings of uneven ownership, leaving open how assets relate to the full range of mobility, including non‐migration and rural‐bound moves, where ownership is near‐universal. This study examines that question in Lao PDR, a setting of gradual urbanisation and continued rural dominance. Drawing on the nationally representative Lao Social Indicator Survey, it models three outcomes: migration versus non‐migration, rural versus urban residence among non‐migrants, and the direction of movement among migrants. Two findings emerge. First, mobility in Laos is multidirectional rather than a single rural‐to‐urban flow: measured against rural–urban migration, rural–rural movement is about three times as common, and urban–urban and urban–rural flows each about twice as common. Second, ownership and renting point in opposite directions: agricultural land and home ownership accompany staying and rural‐bound movement, while renting and internet access accompany urban‐oriented mobility. Notably, urban residence does not preclude landholding: most urban residents still own farmland. These findings extend the population geography of assets and mobility beyond the rural‐to‐urban paradigm, revealing a household‐level dual attachment in which the same assets anchor and enable mobility at once.
ABSTRACT The article demonstrates how, under authoritarian practices and post‐colonialism, a state employs deceptive citizenship as an instrument of a ‘new war.’ The deceptive citizenship operates within informational autocracy for a selected category of migrantised people, which make them unaware about the legal, political and mobility consequences of this status. By obscuring the legal, political, and mobility consequences of this status, it enables authorities to symbolically project power beyond territorial boundaries and consolidate their geopolitical post‐colonial standing among citizens. Using Russia's citizenship policies towards displaced Ukrainians between 2014 and 2022 as a case study, this article traces the complex genealogy of these policies and shows how, prior to the full‐scale invasion, they served geopolitical ambitions and postcolonial hegemony. At the same time, it demonstrates that displaced Ukrainians' citizenship practices were driven primarily by the need to cope with uncertainty and insecurity.
ABSTRACT This study adopts a biographical approach to examine migrants' integration experiences within the UK labour market. It employs monthly retrospective data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) and the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to identify distinct occupational trajectories experienced by migrants who arrived in the UK between 1927 and 2016. We identified five representative trajectories capturing labour market stability (i.e. stable paid employment, stable self‐employment, and stable family care), precarity (transitional unemployment) and enhancement (investing in education). Overall, these trajectories evidence that a high proportion of UK migrants experienced successful integration, characterised by fast and sustainable labour market entry, while only a small percentage (2.36%) experienced transitional unemployment. EU nationals were substantially more likely than non‐EU migrants to experience this success, despite being less educated on average and entering without prior job offers. Our analysis also revealed that gender, education, age at arrival, and ethnicity all significantly influence the integration process. They interact in unique ways to influence the probability of immigrants embarking on one of the identified trajectories. High national unemployment during migrants' year of arrival was identified as a consistent factor of labour market exclusion, indicating that initial inactivity significantly increased migrants' vulnerability to future economic scarring.
ABSTRACT The escalation of conflict in Ukraine in March 2022 triggered the mass displacement of Ukrainian people. In response, the UK government launched the Homes for Ukraine scheme, a private hosting initiative that urged members of the public to temporarily host refugees in their homes. As of December 2024, around 194,800 Ukrainian refugees had been issued visas through the scheme. Despite the significance of the scheme, little is known about the geography of refugees and hosts, factors that have influenced this geography, and how this geographical distribution shaped the temporary integration of Ukrainian refugees. This paper employs a mixed‐methods design, integrating qualitative interviews with Ukrainian refugees and those hosting them, with spatial mapping and regression modelling, to examine the geography of the Homes for Ukraine scheme. Our findings demonstrate that while hosting was geographically widespread, there were distinct regional trends, with more Ukrainian refugees being hosted in southern England. Various factors were associated with this distinct geography, including average income levels, as well as the availability of spare rooms. Finally, we show that many areas home to higher rates of Ukrainian refugees pose challenges for their temporary integration due to higher housing costs, as well as limited availability of social housing. These findings contribute to wider understandings of migration and refuge by demonstrating the significance of place‐based attributes in not only determining where displaced people are able to move but also in shaping their temporary integration into hosting areas.
ABSTRACT How do older adults reshape the spatial demography of a middle‐income country undergoing one of the fastest population‐ageing transitions on record? Brazil offers a particularly informative case: its share of population aged 60 or above rose from 6.2% in 1980 to 10.8% in 2010 and is projected to reach 25% by 2050, and a nationally administered pension regime makes benefits fully portable across the country's 5565 municipalities. Using large‐sample microdata from four Brazilian Demographic Censuses (1980–2010, 84 million records harmonised to 4298 stable comparable areas) linked to municipal economic accounts, we document a senior counter‐current with the hallmarks of counter‐urbanisation. Senior inter‐area mobility declines with age yet remains substantial through retirement ages, and it is not local boundary‐hopping: the median senior move covers roughly 100 kilometres and nearly a third crosses state lines. Older Brazilians move against the working‐age tide—the largest metropolitan areas lose retirees on net, while small and medium‐sized interior destinations receive them at rates reaching 5%–6% of initial population per 5‐year window. Receiving areas expand demographically—in total population, working‐age cohorts, employment, housing stock and services activity—but GDP per capita and agricultural value added grow more slowly, a pattern consistent with retirees transmitting purchasing power to destinations whose productive base does not scale with the inflow. These associations are robust to geographic‐amenity controls, pre‐trend conditioning and microregion fixed effects and geographically weighted regressions show they hold across virtually the entire national territory; we are explicit, however, that positive selection of destinations bounds them above any causal effect. We discuss what the Brazilian counter‐current implies for population geography and for other middle‐income countries tracing the same demographic curve.
ABSTRACT This special issue has a central focus on intergenerational spaces of care , which have been rather under‐explored in studies of transnational families to date. In this introduction, we outline the potential innovative contribution of care ethics to understanding intergenerational caring relations within and across borders, showing how several papers in the special issue are enriched by this conceptual framing. The special issue also advances understandings of the intersecting inequalities that may marginalise different generations of transnational families. Such structural inequalities are often embedded within increasingly restrictive im/mobility regimes that characterise contemporary migration landscapes in Europe and beyond, within the wider global context of ‘crisis’‐driven displacement and post‐pandemic times. We call for a relational, intergenerational understanding of care and intersecting inequalities in transnational families. Future research needs to ensure children's and young people's perspectives are included, involve multiple generations to produce relational family analyses, and to connect studies of transnational families with those on family caring relations more generally. Finally, this special issue shows the harms caused by restrictive immigration, care and welfare regimes and the need for policies to be based on more expansive, non‐normative definitions of ‘family’ that recognise the significance of transnational family care in filling gaps within sedentary welfare regimes and enabling different generations to live ‘care‐filled lives’.
ABSTRACT Healthcare systems worldwide face growing challenges related to workforce shortages, uneven personnel distribution, governance and long‐term sustainability. The training and mobility of healthcare professionals are central to these challenges, yet the interdependencies between medical education, healthcare provision, workforce planning and mobility are often governed across different institutions, policy domains and scales. This article examines how the Romanian healthcare and medical education systems are shaped by (dis)connections across individual, regional, national and international scales. Romania provides a particularly revealing case, occupying a dual position within Europe as both a major supplier of doctors to other countries and an international hub for medical education. Adopting a multi‐scalar approach, we develop (dis)connection as an empirically derived category and diagnostic tool to examine how divergences between policy domains, geographic inequalities and the frictions between individual career trajectories and national and international labour market demands contribute to a fragmented yet transnationally entangled healthcare system. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Romania and Switzerland, the study foregrounds the perspectives of key actors across medical education, policy, and labour sectors, offering a nuanced examination of the tensions and negotiations that shape current healthcare systems. Our findings show that horizontal institutional coordination, spatial inequalities and misalignments between individual aspirations and systemic needs create persistent strain within Romania's healthcare system. While international mobility for education and work generates opportunities at the individual and institutional levels, it often undermines sustainable workforce planning and retention from a national perspective. Tracing the ambivalent effects of (dis)connections across multiple scales reveals both dysfunctions and potential leverage points for transformation. With these findings and the conceptual lens of (dis)connections, we contribute to broader interdisciplinary debates on the sustainability of healthcare systems in increasingly interconnected contexts.
ABSTRACT This study examines how socio‐spatial mobility across middle childhood and early adolescence is associated with perceived agency, using five waves of Young Lives Peru panel data (ages 8–15; N = 2,099). A multidimensional measure of socio‐spatial mobility is constructed to capture residential moves, rural‐urban transitions, and poverty trajectories. Their combined associations with agency at age 15 are estimated using linear, lagged, and time‐aligned models. Results reveal substantial heterogeneity across mobility pathways. Upward spatial mobility, particularly transitions from rural into urban, resource‐rich environments, is associated with higher levels of agency, net of household characteristics, contextual conditions, and time‐varying shocks. Children remaining in persistent rural poverty consistently report the lowest levels of agency, as do those exposed to repeated residential moves, pointing to a destabilising effect of chronic spatial disruption. These patterns are robust to alternative model specifications, including adjustments for prior levels of agency, and indicate that the implications of socio‐spatial mobility depend on whether movement reflects access to opportunity or exposure to instability. Overall, the findings underscore how spatial inequalities become internalised during adolescence, with implications for the persistence of disadvantage over the life course.
ABSTRACT The protracted Brexit process had negative practical and emotional consequences for the millions of Europeans who reside in Britain. The analysis presented in this paper elucidates the circumstances, experiences and perspectives specifically of young Europeans, achieved through interrogation of data from the 2021 Census of England and Wales and a 2023–24 novel, longitudinal survey of 1490 young Europeans. The findings reveal considerable heterogeneity within this cohort, but widespread concerns about employment transitions, housing and mental health. Drawing on concepts of permacrisis and ‘modes of uncertainty’ (Anderson et al. 2020), the research demonstrates how challenges in specific life domains are experienced and have the cumulative effects of significantly shaping how young people live with and in permacrisis. As such, the paper argues for nuanced framings of the European youth migrant experience beyond a precarity‐privilege binary and calls for greater emphasis on the individual, embodied experiences of permacrisis in young people's lives.
ABSTRACT The rapid growth of metropolitan regions is reshaping residents' mobility and attachment to places across scales. However, research on regional‐scale place attachment remains limited, particularly regarding how residents with different identities develop such attachment. Drawing on survey data from nine mainland cities in the Guangdong‐Hong Kong‐Macao Greater Bay Area ( N = 1526), this study examines differences in regional attachment between locals and migrants, along with key influencing factors. A mobility–psychology pathway model is constructed to explain the formation of regional attachment. Findings reveal that work‐related and intra‐regional mobility enhance attachment, while city attachment and satisfaction with work and leisure contribute psychologically. Mechanisms vary between locals and migrants, offering new insights into place attachment and informing inclusive regional and urban policy.
ABSTRACT This study examines how healthcare‐seeking preferences are associated with local embeddedness among Hong Kong residents in Guangzhou, a core city of the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area. While migration scholarship has extensively examined rural‐to‐urban migrants and international migrants, less attention has been paid to intra‐national but cross‐system mobility under One Country, Two Systems. Drawing on a questionnaire survey of 501 Hong Kong residents and cellphone‐based spatial information used to guide sampling, the study adopts a regression‐based path‐modelling strategy to examine conditional associations among healthcare preference, cross‐border attachment, local anchoring, and embeddedness‐related outcomes. Healthcare‐seeking preference is measured by whether respondents usually seek care in Guangzhou or rely on Hong Kong‐oriented arrangements, such as returning to Hong Kong hospitals or contacting Hong Kong family doctors. Local embeddedness is measured through contact with Mainland friends, sense of belonging to Guangzhou, and long‐term settlement intention in Mainland China. Results show that 19.2% of respondents reported Hong Kong‐oriented healthcare preferences. Such preferences are associated with stronger cross‐border attachment and weaker relational/place‐based local embeddedness, while local anchoring is associated with lower reliance on Hong Kong‐oriented care. These findings do not establish causality but highlight healthcare as an everyday site where cross‐border attachment and local embeddedness intersect.
ABSTRACT This paper examines Chinese overseas labor migration under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through the lens of legal (in)visibility, i.e., the uneven ways workers, employment relations, and workplace harms become legible or remain opaque within legal systems. While existing research has documented the growth of Chinese labor mobility alongside the rollout of BRI, less is known about how recruitment, overseas management, and dispute resolution are governed across borders, and what kinds of labor protections are practically enforceable. Drawing on a dataset of labor lawsuits adjudicated in Chinese courts involving Chinese workers and Chinese companies operating in five African countries, the paper shows that overseas labor migration is featured by selective and uneven legal visibility. The cases surface disputes over remuneration, contractual obligations, recruitment and dispatch fees, and work‐related injuries. They also reveal how layered subcontracting, dispatch arrangements, and informal brokerage complicate employer identification and responsibility. The analysis identifies three forms of legal (in)visibility: (1) employment relationships are partially obscured by fragmented contracting chains; (2) workers are visible as deployable labor yet only contingently recognized as rights‐bearing subjects when seeking remedies; and (3) judicial procedures individualize disputes in ways that reduce structural conditions to limited, document‐driven claims. The paper contributes to broader debates on transnational labor governance and the role of home state institutions in governing overseas labor migration.
ABSTRACT Since the end of February 2022, most European Union countries have experienced a substantial inflow of refugees from Ukraine. The pace and scale of this movement are unprecedented. In some countries, such as Poland, this inflow has coincided with the presence of economic migrants who had arrived prior to the outbreak of the war. This article examines the spatial relationships between the inflow of Ukrainian refugees and (i) distance from the Ukrainian border, and (ii) the distribution of economic migrants, and analyses how these relationships have evolved over time. The results demonstrate a significant influence of the Ukrainian diaspora on the spatial distribution of refugees, with this effect strengthening over time.
ABSTRACT This article examines how love shapes the economic and gendered aspects of migrant couple relationships. Drawing on narrative interviews carried out between 2015 and 2016 with couples Brussels, Barcelona and London, the study focuses on couples whose mobility was primarily because of love. I argue that a couple's shared understanding of love shapes how they negotiate economic and social factors and takes precedence in their migration decisions and trajectories. Presenting the novel concept of love migration, as mobility motivated by the negotiation and development of the couple's relationship, this article contends that love should occupy a more central place in migration research. Situating the findings in relation to empirical data from a wider global context provides a useful point of comparison and provides insights about what might be unique about love migration.
ABSTRACT Spousal loss is a major life transition that may reshape one's socioeconomic and psychological conditions, yet little is known about how housing trajectories change before and after spousal loss. This study examines how spousal loss affects housing relocation and housing affordability stress over time, and whether these trajectories differ between owner‐occupiers and renters. The study used individual‐level longitudinal data from the Korea Welfare Panel Study (KoWePS) to examine within‐individual trajectories of housing relocation and housing affordability stress before and after spousal loss. A fixed‐effects regression model analyzed housing relocation and affordability stress, defined as housing‐related costs exceeding 30% of household income before and after spousal loss. Interaction terms between spousal loss timing and housing tenure assessed differences between owner‐occupiers and renters. Housing relocation probability significantly increased at the time of spousal loss and in the following year. Housing affordability stress rose 2 years before spousal loss and remained elevated for at least 3 years afterward. Owner‐occupiers were less likely to relocate during spousal loss and in the first year following it compared to renters. Additionally, owner‐occupiers experienced less housing affordability stress at spousal loss and for up to 3 years after compared to renters. Spousal loss significantly affects housing outcomes, with increased likelihood of relocation and prolonged housing affordability stress. Owner‐occupiers appear to be better protected against these negative effects compared to renters, suggesting that housing tenure plays a crucial role in mitigating the housing‐related challenges associated with spousal loss.
ABSTRACT Migration is increasingly recognised as an adaptive strategy to enhance social resilience amid environmental and socioeconomic stressors. However, systematic assessments of its impact on both migrants and their households remain limited. This study applies the translocal social resilience framework to analyse migration outcomes across origin and destination areas, individual and household levels, and their intersection as translocal dyads. Using the quantitative bi‐local survey data from the “Migration and Translocality in West Africa” project in Ghana, we assess how migration shapes social resilience among 100 household‐migrant pairs. Our findings reveal that three sub‐groups of migrants are more likely to experience improved resilience: those from the Eastern Region, men, and those with higher socio‐economic endowments. However, these gains are not always mirrored at the household level. Only one in four dyads achieves mutually beneficial outcomes; most fall into “asymmetrical livelihoods”, where migrants thrive but households experience emotional distress or reduced resilience. The regional origin, gender and class of individuals are key structural determinants of resilience outcomes. This study provides a nuanced, systems‐based understanding of migration as adaptation, and highlights the need for regionally specific, gender‐sensitive, and cross‐scalar policy approaches.
