Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
This chapter provides an assessment of the age-friendly programmes developed in the city of Manchester and Greater Manchester from the late 1990s. First, it provides an overview of demographic and social characteristics of Manchester and Greater Manchester. Second, it reviews the evolution of, and the influences behind, age-friendly work in Manchester. Third, developments at a regional level are discussed, in particular the development of the Greater Manchester Ageing Hub. Fourth, national age-friendly work is summarised, notably the expansion of the UK Network of Age-Friendly Cities. Finally, the chapter provides a critical reflection on age-friendly work in the city and the region, and provides some thoughts about likely developments up to 2030.
This chapter presents a critical perspective on Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) by analysing key aspects of guidance documents for the World Health Organization’s Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities. Our analysis is premised on the idea that a greater plurality of approaches to AFCC praxis – especially those that are explicitly relationally oriented and centre issues of positionality and power – is necessary for the movement to better achieve aspirational goals concerning ageing and health equity. We call for an emancipatory approach to centre the experiences of marginalised and minoritised older adults and to advance complementary or alternative epistemologies that inform and undergird AFCC praxis. We envision such an approach as richly embedded in critical gerontology and Black feminist scholarship, orienting to issues of precarity, racism, patriarchy and the quest for epic theory. By building, in part, on the work of AFCC thought leaders over the past decade, our work of both dismantling and rebuilding offers promise for addressing issues of diversity, equity, inclusion and anti-racism within AFCC efforts, and for improving their reach, effectiveness and sustainability.
This chapter discusses how age-friendly programmes can advance social and spatial justice in cities through their involvement of older people from marginalised groups. It draws on the experience of the Ambition for Ageing programme, a programme of work aimed at creating age-friendly communities in Greater Manchester, to show how an explicit focus on issues of (in)equalities can help age-friendly programmes in reaching out to and involving older people living in low-income neighbourhoods as well as those from minority communities of identity and experience. It explores how the Ambition for Ageing programme did this through a focus on co-production, adopting a ‘test and learn’ approach and by reconsidering the different geographies at which older people experience marginalisation. It offers important lessons for future age-friendly programmes working with diverse communities.
This chapter argues that a critical urban gerontology must examine the power structures that shape inequalities within age groups and generations. This means examining the patterns and mechanisms of inequality in later life and how these reflect processes operating across the life course. So, rather than centring a distinction between younger and older people – in effect those pre- and post-retirement – this chapter proposes centring a discussion of class, racism and patriarchy, and how related processes operate to shape people’s experiences of later life. In doing so, it suggests that we need to move beyond partially theorised proximal processes and instead focus on fundamental causes that reflect how class, racism and patriarchy operate at macro (structural), meso (institutional) and micro (interpersonal) levels. It concludes with a discussion of why the reach of institutions into structural and interpersonal domains might make institutional transformation a valuable route to redress inequalities in later life.
This chapter re-evaluates the role of architects in developing Age-Friendly Cities and Communities, arguing that the current focus on designing physically accessible environments should be expanded to include broader issues of spatial ageism. We define spatial ageism as the ways in which the built environment is shaped by limited, medicalised or simplistic understandings of later life – a condition perpetuated through the conscious and unconscious prejudices of those involved in shaping the built environment. We propose participatory design practices as a way of addressing the entrenched, multifaceted marginalisation of older people within the urban environment. The chapter uses a case study in Manchester, UK to highlight how physical, social, economic and cultural exclusion can be addressed by valuing the equity, diversity and creativity of older people in the design process. By demonstrating that the link between societal prejudice and its manifestations in the built environment is reciprocal, we conclude by proposing that spatial justice in cities cannot be addressed unless urban designers are proactive in challenging ageism within their own practices.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
How can we design, develop and adapt urban environments to better meet the needs and aspirations of an increasingly diverse ageing population?
This edited collection offers a new approach to understanding the opportunities and challenges of creating ‘age-friendly’ communities in the context of urban change. Drawing together insights from leading voices across a range of disciplines, the book emphasises the urgent need to address inequalities that shape the experience of ageing in urban environments.
The book combines a focus on social justice, equity, diversity, and co-production to enhance urban life. Exploring a range of age-friendly community projects, contributors demonstrate that, despite structural obstacles, meaningful social change is achievable at a local level.
This chapter sets out the role of community organisations in creating spatially just age-friendly cities. Based on longitudinal qualitative research on how the community and voluntary sector in Greater Manchester in the UK responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, it argues that the pandemic highlighted the critical role that community and voluntary organisations played in responding to the needs of older people, particularly those belonging to marginalised groups of identity or experience, and those living in low-income neighbourhoods. However, the research also demonstrates the increasing pressures these organisations face, pressures which have been growing due to decreasing resources for public and community sector services for decades, and which are set to continue in many European countries. In this context, the chapter makes several recommendations for a community-centred approach to developing age-friendly cities, one that is based on principles of spatial justice and is vital both in supporting older people during future crises as well as in the everyday life of cities.
This chapter outlines the background, aims and research questions of the book, drawing on a theoretical framework which embeds age-friendly work in debates about spatial justice. It develops a novel definition of spatial justice and explores its potential in progressing the age-friendly agenda, drawing on the principles of equity, co-production and diversity. It calls for a radical, creative and aspirational approach to creating age-friendly communities, one which is informed by a community participation model to urban planning and which facilitates the active involvement of people of all ages, including older adults with diverse identities, capabilities, needs and ambitions. Combining interdisciplinary and cross-sectorial perspectives, it aims to inspire a radical reimagining of how we understand and support the ‘age-friendliness’ of urban neighbourhoods.
Cities have long functioned as primary drivers for trade, investment and regional economic development, as well as sites where individuals emerge from their private spaces, connect with each other, form solidarities, politicize themselves and begin to think as a group with distinctive interconnected interests (Hytrek, 2020), to create what Mouffe (1996) calls chains of equivalence. Particularly in the US, cities manage a broad array of offloaded regulatory responsibilities and socio-economic risks and are important geographical targets and institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal market-based policy experiments (Peck et al, 2009: 58). These range from place marketing, enterprise zones, property redevelopment schemes and local tax abatements to workfare policies and new strategies of social control, along with a host of other institutional modifications within the local governmental apparatus. Even as US cities increasingly function as sites for neoliberal strategies and for securing order and control of marginalized populations, they remain incubators of and platforms for counterhegemonic movements. Yet the politicizing effects of cities are not uniform across space, with new movements emerging in some unlikely cities, those without histories of progressive activism.
In this chapter, I analyse one such case, Long Beach, CA, where a long history of conservative politics was dramatically and quickly reversed by the unexpected gelling of a historically fragmented labour and community sector into a viable progressive movement. To understand the rapid turnaround, the analysis draws upon the secondary city literature that examines the mechanisms through which smaller regional (secondary) cities are able to ‘punch above their weight’ and achieve economic performance unique for their size.
