Self-initiated residential mobility in pandemic times: A Schumpeterian perspective

This paper reads voluntary residential relocation during the COVID-19 pan-demic in Romania through the lens of creative destruction, counter-balancingits more common framing of disruption. Revisiting Schumpeter’s classicthesis, we adapt its economic concepts into a social vocabulary of new“lifeforms,” “mutations” and “wants,” enacted by agentic pandemic moversin pursuit of a better way of life. Drawing on 77 qualitative questionnaires, weexamine how urban-to-rural and urban-to-urban movers negotiated push-and-pull factors, and to what extent their relocations reflect creative lifestyletransformations. We introduce the metaphor of “privileged mutations” todescribe urban-to-rural moves as deep forms of creative destruction: oldhousing wants were discarded and “revolutionary” new ones emerged,potentially setting in motion a second creative destruction, that of place.Yet, not all moves were radical: most urban-to-urban relocations reflectquieter transformations driven by a quest for home-comfort that thoserelatively privileged have always pursued along life-course while remainingattached to the buzz of urban life. By extending the Schumpeterian frame-work to the wants of voluntary residential mobility, we highlight its largelyuntapped potential in the social sciences, inviting scholars to consider howcrises can catalyze, not just disrupt, the ways in which people imagine andinhabit homes and places.