The aim of this paper is to analyse young adults' experiences of moving and the role of identity narratives; how intersecting and multiple identities are constructed through their mobility; and the significance of space and representations of space and place in the processes of subject formation. The focus of this paper is on stories of mobility and the representations of one of many European rural peripheries: the Swedish North. The narratives offer alternative ways of thinking of the urban and the rural; people desire and belong across the places of migration. Even so, the hegemonic neoliberal understanding of the city as progress is reproduced by the informants, while at the same time some of them describe the rural as progressive for valuing the immaterial things people today have forgotten. These narratives can be viewed as ways of both reproducing and resisting the neoliberal understanding of the ‘need to be mobile’. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.