Beyond the City Life: Assembling Everyday Family Life After Counterurbanisation

ABSTRACT Despite a long history of urbanisation in Sweden, recent migration research notes a renewed interest in counterurbanisation as well as a higher propensity for families to become counterurban movers. While many of the motives described in counterurbanisation research tend to align with push/pull arguments, the migration decision process is likely to be more complex as it relies on individuals' spatial perceptions and evaluations combined with individual opportunities and constraints for mobility. In migration, everyday practices become disrupted, as the spatial anchoring of certain amenities means that they cannot easily be brought to the new location. This paper focuses on the migration experiences of young counterurbanising families, analysing qualitatively how different amenities are valued and how the trade‐off is experienced and negotiated between members of the family unit. Presenting everyday family life from the perspective of assemblages, we seek to grasp at the complexity of the material, social and emotive context of individual and family lifeworlds. Assemblage thinking allows for considering how different elements in everyday life are valued; which are indispensable and which are possible to replace. The logic of assemblages thus opens up for thinking about how everyday life can be disassembled and reassembled through migration, and how family members negotiate this (de/re)construction of everyday life.