Scottish residents' preferences for places to live. What services and place characteristics matter most?

Digital poster presented at the ENRA (Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture) Science, Evidence and Policy Conference 2025, Edinburgh, 30 September 2025. Abstract: The sustainability of rural economies requires a healthy population structure and local availability of necessary skills. This can be achieved by retaining the current population and attracting new dwellers. Accordingly, the Scottish Government’s National Population Strategy aims to promote “a population [that] is more balanced and distributed across Scotland.” While often desirable from the naturalistic point of view, rural, island and remote locations are generally characterised by lower accessibility to keystone services, forcing people to make difficult trade-offs. Therefore, we investigate Scottish residents’ willingness to move (or not) to places that differ in terms of their natural environment, and service accessibility. Our results allow us to draw conclusions on what is needed to attract different demographics to such places.