Capital configurations and trade-offs: How do families with children, wishing to move to a rural area, search for their new location in order to achieve desired forms of capital?

Since the 1970s, the concept of counterurbanization has been used within geographical and rural studies to denote the demographic revival and growth of rural areas. However, little is known about how contemporary urban-to-rural migrants actually search for their future residence. This is unfortunate, as the increased use of internet search tools may become a crucial facilitator for significant counterurbanization by providing families key information about hitherto ‘forgotten’ places where they can, better than in the larger cities, achieve the specific stocks, or ‘configurations’, of social, cultural and economic capital they desire. Therefore, drawing on Contextual Inquiry based, semi-structured interviews with 8 Danish families in various parts of Denmark in spring 2018, the purpose is to shed more light on how families with children in practice use what we term information capital, i.e. online and offline search strategies, in order to find their ideal rural place to live. In this way, information capital becomes a kind of ‘auxiliary’ capital, which allows various types of families to identify and achieve exactly the configurations of capital they desire and, by this, increase their life quality. Within a dynamic, Bourdieusian capital conversion framework, the paper shows how the families must ‘sacrifice’ capital in order to achieve desired forms of capital, that is, make trade off between various forms of capital, as for example trading off economic for social capital. •Urban-to-rural migrant families can be divided into three ideal types: Relation, Practical and Practical-Relation families.•Trade-off strategies: In relation to relocation, families traded off some forms of capital for others, e.g. economic for social.•Internet search tools should be seen as an important facilitator for counterurbanization.•In their search for a new rural location, both online and offline information capital became crucial for all families.