The health crisis, with its confinements and the development of teleworking, seems to have pushed many city dwellers to dream of large spaces and a life in more human-sized municipalities. A study published on Tuesday by INSEE seems to confirm this trend.
Thus, 283,000 people have left Île-de-France for another metropolitan region in 2021, i.e. 56,000 more people than in 2019 (+25%). “Occitanie and Brittany as well as Centre-Val de Loire and Hauts-de-France are the regions towards which arrivals increased the most “, underlines the author Chantal Brutel.
Declining mobility to Île-de-France
Another lesson is that mobility between regions outside Île-de-France increased by 37,000 people between 2019 and 2021, an increase of 6%. It is all the more remarkable that between 2016 and 2019, they had decreased by 2% on average per year. Mobility from the provinces to Île-de-France remained stable (around 120,000 people).
In addition to geographical developments, after the Covid crisis, there is an increased attraction for less populated areas. In 2021, 756,000 people left an area more populated than their place of destination, an increase of 15%, ending three years of stability in this number. On the contrary, moves to a municipality of the same size decreased by 200,000 people (-4%).
More departures to rural areas
In a similar dynamic, 11% of movers left the urban space for the rural space, an increase of 12% between 2019 and 2021, while the trend was stable with the covid crisis . “However, the attractiveness of rural areas is limited in three quarters of cases to peri-urban municipalities located in the crown of the attraction areas of the cities”, emphasizes the author. The level of moves from urban attraction areas to isolated municipalities remained stable.
These changes in the structure of mobility come as 6.8 million people moved in 2021 – around 10% of the population – two thirds of them to a nearby location: 31% in the same municipality and 35% in the same department. These figures are close to the pre-Covid situation. “The evolution of residential mobility according to age, type of family or even socio-professional category is weak between 2019 and 2021”, underlines the author again.