Spending time in second homes has for a long time been an important tourist activity, particularly in many economically well-off countries. However, from a time-geography perspective, the use of second homes has often been constrained by work life and school holidays and predominantly retired households could make use of second homes outside holidays and weekends, too. The recent Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that the digitalization of work life indeed enabled a much larger share of population to engage in remote work and develop multilocal living arrangements that are expected to persist in time even beyond the immediate pandemic situation. In this context second homes have become nodes in such spatial arrangements but of course, because of distance and other constraints, places and second homes offer different opportunities to engage in such a setup. In this paper time-geography is used as a way of theorizing the changing second home use patterns that have been triggered by the pandemic and its objective is to analyze how second home use has changed during the Covid-19 pandemic. A methodological challenge in this context is the availability of relevant data revealing the use patterns of second homes. This research tackles this challenge by utilizing geo-coded cellphone data for a region in northern Sweden. By combining the information of cellphone localizations with second-home ownership patterns, it is possible to assess the shifting use of second homes and at the same time reveal geographical properties that signify the second homes that are comprised by multilocal living arrangements. The preliminary results indicate that far from all second home areas call for an inclusion in multilocal living arrangements and that second homes in attractive locations are used more frequently. The paper ends with discussing potential impacts of the changing geographies of multilocal living on the destination communities.
Mots clés : Second homes|Multilocality|Tourism|Time-geography|Sweden
A103335DM