Entrepreneurial Back-to-Landers: How Neo-Farmers in Turkey Choose Where to Settle

Abstract

Recently, a new trajectory of urban-to-rural migration has begun to emerge in the Turkish countryside. This trajectory consists of primarily white-collar workers, born and raised in the cities, with no background in agriculture, leaving their jobs in the cities, moving to villages and taking up farming. In this paper, through semi-structured interviews with 83 such ‘neo-farmers,’ I explore how they choose where to settle. I argue that even though they are concentrated in the Marmara, the Aegean and the western Mediterranean regions, commonly considered as vacation resorts with easy access to major cities, this concentration does not indicate a desire to continue urban habits and lifestyles. Rather, I show that they choose where to settle through a tradeoff between new lifestyle priorities, and political, social and economic constraints. I argue that economic and non-economic factors act as priorities and constraints, and that the eventual choice rests on a complex calculation, determined, in the final stage, by non-economic factors; more precisely, migrants' perceptions of the social and the political leanings of the larger community into which they are thinking of moving, and their thoughts on whether they can fit in or not.