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Beyond Gentrification: Rural Places as Spatial Safety Nets Jennifer Sherman*, Jennifer Sherman, Margiana Petersen-Rockney, Hilary Faxon,

Rural gentrification has been a defining concern of 21st century rural studies, encompassing rising housing costs and housing shortages, loss of access to land, and cultural change in both land uses and local services. However, as studies focused on rural gentrification proliferate, the concept has become less clear, often straying far from its original roots in urban neighborhood change, as well as the clear stages in which it is commonly theorized to occur. A  focus on tourism and recreation as the main settings for this process obscures other forms of rural transformation driven by urban-rural interaction, including the growth of land- and water-hungry data centers, pandemic-era remote work migration, property speculation by outsiders seeking refuge from urban threats, renewable energy infrastructure, and in-migration driven by specific livelihoods beyond recreation and lifestyle factors.

In this paper, we argue for the creation of a new concept that can better encapsulate these distinct and diverse forms of rural-urban inequality and interconnection. While traditional definitions underscore the ways gentrification fundamentally changes the character and composition of place, we highlight cases where in-migrants seek to preserve rurality, (mis)understood as unchanging – the static beauty and remoteness of idealized landscapes, a cowboy lifestyle, or agrarian livelihoods. In doing so, they challenge rural communities even as they affirm their desirability. Drawing on case studies from Washington, Montana, and California, we show how struggles over landscapes, livelihoods, and lifestyles reveal a recurring pattern: rural places functioning as “spatial safety nets” where they are treated as flexible reserves to solve outsiders’ material problems (land, housing, resources) and fulfill symbolic desires (refuge, escape, storage) arising from urban-rural inequalities. While the outcomes of these processes can be rural housing stress and marginalization, they can also forge new connections and reveal racialized and classed rules about who and what “belongs,” revealing underlying tensions and dynamic disagreements about the definition and value of the rural. Understanding these larger dynamics will better prepare rural sociologists to make sense of rurality in the 21st century.