The ongoing nature of France's attractiveness for both tourist and resident is the subject of the present examination of the evolution in creating the need for, in promoting and in identifying places (‘territories'). Once an end in itself, tourism has also become a means of ‘testing' places for their residential potential. Migratory flows do in fact tend to follow tourist flows. The concept of migration for pleasure or lifestyle enhancement (‘amenity migration') describes such movements, which assign novel functions and identities to traditional tourism sites. However this also brings into play references and attributes of tourism, in the production of new residential areas located in places with no strong host tradition. In this case, the tourism development stage no longer appears as a prerequisite to territorial trajectory, and is replaced by amenity migration as part of a developmentalist undertaking. The foregoing observations open up a rich, yet little-explored, field of study on the links between the concepts of post-tourism migrations and those undertaken for pleasure (‘amenity'), and which involve the intermingling of residential, economic and recreational functions. It is with this context in mind that the central question concerns what ‘amenity migration' really ‘does' to recreational practices and to tourist areas over a wide range of rural and mountain locations. This means examining the changes and reconversions observed in the way in which post-tourism processes and amenity migrations contribute to redefining the status and dynamics of rural and mountain areas. Finally, an attempt is also made to position the subject among more global processes of the evolution of contemporary societies, with discussions of different moot paradigms.
