Rural Gentrification as Landscape Conflict. The Case of Chalet-Villages in the Austrian Alps

Luxury cottages adapting traditional alpine architecture has become a widespread phenomenon in rural Alpine areas. These chalets or chalet-villages are primarily built for investors, tourists or secondary homeowners. Consequently, these real estate investments push the sealing of landscapes, such as pasture land, open green spaces and forests into building sites. Furthermore, chalet-villages also lead to local conflicts about the availability of space for housing in rural areas—all classical issues of landscape conflicts. This chapter discusses these transformations of alpine rural landscapes based on media reports about chalet-villages in Alpine regions of Austria and connects them with the academic literature on rural gentrification. We argue that the phenomenon of chalet-villages refers to landscape conflicts in different dimensions: first, chalet-villages represent the commodification of rural landscapes, materialized in the rise of property prices. Second, the construction of chalets in attractive Alpine landscapes means an ecological transformation of unsealed areas and an increase of environmental problems. This transformation causes conflicts with local residents, which we analyze from an environmental justice perspective.