This article aims to give an overview of how place meanings are created and how they influence people's sense of belonging. It should be noted that the current literature has various shortcomings which mostly result from the lack of interdisciplinary research. The studies in place attachment usually focus on personal sense of belonging leaving aside those extending over various scales -such as, for instance, national identity. Also, place meanings and identity are primarily discussed as the very personal phenomena. On the contrary, place making and shaping is usually seen through more structural viewpoint by claiming that places mainly change in result of political or economic processes. Nowadays, there are even claims that due to the influx of globalization place no more matters and similar processes will happen everywhere. This notion does not take into account the special character of every place and the fact that outside forces come together in different ways in every place. Authors suggest that these different perspectives need to be united in order to fully grasp the character of place making and place meanings. In current articles, authors have adopted the multi-disciplinary approach and understood the place as uniting different processes starting from deeply personal meaning creation and ending with changes happening in global scale.

This paper examines recent migration from three little-studied EU countries, the Baltic states, focusing on early-career graduates who move to London. It looks at how these young migrants explain the reasons for their move, their work and living experiences in London, and their plans for the future, based on 78 interviews with individual migrants. A key objective of this paper is to rejuvenate the core-periphery structural framework through the theoretical lens of London as an 'escalator' region for career development. We add a necessary nuance on how the time dimension is crucial in understanding how an escalator region functions -both in terms of macro-events such as EU enlargement or economic crisis, and for life-course events such as career advancement or family formation. Our findings indicate that these educated young adults from the EU's north-eastern periphery migrate for a combination of economic, career, lifestyle and personal-development reasons. They are ambivalent about their futures and when, and whether, they will return-migrate.

No abstract

No abstract

This article makes the case for using the concept of lifestyle migration to understand return migration. The key argument is that there are several advantages for engaging with lifestyle migration literature when analysing people's return, of which the prime reason is to draw attention away from the affective and emotional aspects of return migration and view it as a conscious decision related to future planning. A combination of statistical data and interviews with highly skilled Estonian migrants in the UK shows how the return of these migrants is often related to moving from one life stage to another. In the conscious process of planning for a family, several aspects related to both countries were evaluated and the return was often explained as benefitting the (potential) family. The article also claims that there is a need for lifestyle migration research to engage more actively on interlinkages between lifestyle and life stage.