Privileged mutations: enacting residential lifestyle mobility in pandemic times

We take the case of desired residential mobility during the pandemic with the intent of going beyond understanding the pandemic as disruption, framing it instead as creative destruction. By revisiting Joseph Schumpeter’s classic thesis, we transpose its economic into a social vocabulary of new ‘lifeforms’, ‘mutations’ and ‘wants’ that innovative agents–movers, in our case–enact in their quest for the ‘good life’/‘good home’. Drawing on 77 qualitative questionnaires, we examine how urban-to-rural and urban-to-urban movers negotiated the pull-and-push factors of relocation, and to what extent changing house fits a model of lifestyle change. Proposing the metaphor of ‘privileged mutations’, we cast urban-to-rural moves as lasting and thorough creative destructions: old housing wants are rendered obsolete and ‘revolutionary’ new ones are being created, a process which may set in motion a second creative destruction, that of place. However, the landscape of residential mobility during the pandemic also comprises quiet transformations driven by a quest for home comfort that those relatively privileged have always pursued along life-course while remaining attached to the buzz of urban life. Observing the rich potential and underuse of the Schumpeterian perspective in social sciences, we invite scholars to consider its explanatory power in future research.