Providing the first UK assessment of environmental gerontology, this book enriches current understanding of the spatiality of ageing.
Sheila Peace considers how places and spaces contextualise personal experience in varied environments, from urban and rural to general and specialised housing. Situating extensive research within multidisciplinary thinking, and incorporating policy and practice, this book assesses how personal health and wellbeing affect different experiences of environment. It also considers the value of intergenerational and age-related living, the meaning of home and global to local concerns for population ageing.
Drawing on international comparisons, this book offers a valuable resource for new research and important lessons for the future.
Encouraging neighbourhood social mix has been a major goal of urban policy and planning in a number of different countries. This book draws together a range of case studies by international experts to assess the impacts of social mix policies and the degree to which they might represent gentrification by stealth.
The contributions consider the range of social mix initiatives in different countries across the globe and their relationship to wider social, economic and urban change. The book combines understandings of social mix from the perspectives of researchers, policy makers and planners and the residents of the communities themselves. Mixed Communities also draws out more general lessons from these international comparisons - theoretically, empirically and for urban policy. It will be highly relevant for urban researchers and students, policy makers and practitioners alike.
Education is in a state of continual change and schools ever more diverse. People want more participation and meaning in their lives; organisations want more creativity and flexibility. Building on these trends, this timely book argues that a new paradigm is emerging in education, sowing the seeds of a self-organising system that values holistic democracy. It is an essential read for anyone (academics, policy-makers, practitioners, students, parents, school sponsors and partners) who is interested in how education can broaden its horizons.
Transitions to upper secondary education are crucial to understanding social inequalities. In most European countries, it is at this moment when students are separated into different tracks and faced with a ‘real choice’ in relation to their educational trajectory.
Based on a qualitative driven approach with multiple research techniques, including documentary analysis, questionnaires and over 100 interviews with policy makers, teachers and young people in Barcelona and Madrid, this book offers a holistic account of upper secondary educational transitions in urban contexts. Contributors explore the political, institutional and subjective dimensions of these transitions and the multiple mechanisms of inequality that traverse them.
Providing vital insights for policy and practice that are internationally relevant, this book will guarantee greater equity and social justice for young people regarding their educational trajectories and opportunities.
Connolly uses ongoing urban redevelopment in Penang in Malaysia to provide stimulating new perspectives on urbanisation, governance and political ecology.
The book deploys the concept of landscape political ecology to show how Penang residents, activists, planners and other stakeholders mobilize new relationships with the urban environment, to contest controversial development projects and challenge hegemonic visions for the city’s future.
Based on six years of local research, this book provides both a dynamic account of region’s rapid reshaping and a fresh theoretical framework in which to consider issues of sustainable development, heritage and governance in urban areas worldwide.
Environmental gerontologists who are concerned with researching the context of adult human experience and behaviour in later life regard person/environment (P–E) interaction as pivotal to ageing well. Consequently, Chapter 1 opens with the actor and their stage – the separate characteristics of older people and their environment based on lives in Western developed countries. By discussing these separately, they are then brought together to recognise interaction between them in everyday experiences. Finally, we move beyond this individualised interaction within specific contexts, recognising that P–E also must be addressed at a collective level. This has implications both in terms of levels of interaction and the methodology by which the evidence base and research methods, particularly participatory studies, are supported.
Under the heading of Person (P), attention is paid to the boundaries of ageing, in other words how an older person is defined in this text. Consideration is given to ‘successful’ or ‘active’ ageing and proposed definitions of ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ ages. Such definitions are grounded in a heterogeneity that sees each individual as uniquely gendered and ethnically, sexually and culturally distinct. Late life experience is built on an understanding of the self that takes a wider life course perspective. All these characteristics have implications for P–E interaction, and awareness of this diversity is necessary before underlying theoretical perspectives are addressed in Chapter 2. Environment (E) then comes to the fore, with the central concerns being space, place and materiality. The underlying relationship between space and place as social, economic, psychological and cultural is unpacked before public and private domains are examined.
To establish the scope of this chapter, I return to two key factors. First, as outlined in Figure 0.1, environments of ageing can be seen on different but interrelating spatial scales. Second, the relationship between environments seen at these different levels relates to individual behaviour and quality of life, which is revealed through interactions. These factors are considered in the light of theoretical developments taken from two bodies of work, social gerontology (in particular environmental gerontology) and the developing theoretical literature in geographical gerontology that extends our understanding of ageing through the spatial turn, as seen in Chapter 1. In general, theoretical perspectives from social gerontology are centred on the individual based at the local- or micro-level, what can be called the near environment – the dwelling, neighbourhood or community, with some matters relating to city, town and village. The concern here is how ideas can be extended so that environments of ageing can be recognised at both meso- and macro-levels of analysis, involving individual and collective behaviour. Here, perspectives offered by geographical gerontology may be beneficial, as they extend interdisciplinarity and participatory methods and particular theoretical approaches.
As clinical, physiological and psychological aspects of gerontology were studied during the 20th century (Kontos, 2005a), a human ecological perspective developed in the US and in Europe, and this underpins many ideas in environmental gerontology (Kleemier, 1959, 1961; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Bernard and Rowles, 2013; Rowles and Bernard, 2013).
… by 2050, one in six people in the world will be over age 65 (16%), up from one in 11 in 2019 (9%). By 2050, one in four persons living in Europe and Northern America could be aged 65 or over. In 2018, for the first time in history, persons aged 65 or above outnumbered children under five years of age globally. The number of persons aged 80 years or over is projected to triple, from 143 million in 2019 to 426 million in 2050. (UN, 2020)
In the preface to this book, it was noted that a key objective was to address environments of ageing at different levels of spatial scale (Figure 0.1). This chapter focuses on the global context. As this quote from the United Nations (UN) shows, population ageing continues to advance, occurring during a period of dynamic change when globalisation is producing time–space compression through technological development, and when global capitalism is resulting in consumerism becoming more universal (Sassen, 2004; Jones et al, 2008). The interface between major transformations in global health, demography and household composition is changing during a time of parallel challenges regarding urbanisation, migration, climate change, the built environment and technological development. Neo-liberalism has become the dominant political force, leading environments to become more or less inclusive for different cohorts, generations and groups (Walker, 2005; Phillips and Feng, 2018; IMF, 2020a, 2020b). The issues addressed here are historic and ongoing, with authors such as Phillipson (2003, 2007a, 2007b) alerting us to their breadth, diversity and impact on the ageing individual (see Figure 3.1).
While different dimensions of environment – physical, social, cultural, political – can be considered separately, together they form the environmental context of place that is central to an ecological perspective. Throughout their lives, people live in dynamic interaction with this context, developing psychological understanding of it (Wahl and Lang, 2004; Keating et al, 2013), a view referred to here as ‘environmental living’. Environmental living in later life is the focus of the following five chapters. We move to national (meso-) and local (micro-) scales of reference, using the UK and England as an example, in which locations, settings and situations can be examined. As these scenarios are central to research undertaken by the author and colleagues over the past decades, Chapter 6 forms a bridge to empirical research connecting issues relating to intergenerational and age-related environments. The concept of ‘home’ alongside associated issues of ‘homeland’ is pivotal in this discussion; it is introduced here and is a running theme throughout.
The word ‘home’ has diverse cultural definitions and is at the heart of a breadth of literature. For many it is a locational term, which is focused on specific housing yet often has a broader base regarding neighbourhood, community, city and nation – connecting with the concept of homeland. This extended definition includes layers of attachment that help to define a person’s identity within a particular place. Space and place merge in a meaning of home that is associated with the personal through positive concepts of belonging, security, familiarity and privacy, while sometimes guarding negative concerns regarding gendered domestic activity, non-decent housing, isolation, loneliness and a life of fear or abuse (Peace, 2015).
More than 90 per cent of older people in the UK live in general needs housing, forming the major component when discussing environments of ageing. Table 5.1 outlines the range of housing forms in later life. Approximately 5–6 per cent of the older population live in age-related communal housing, discussed in Chapter 7 along with co-housing, intentional housing that can be intergenerational or age-related. Additionally, 4–5 per cent live in care homes (residential and nursing care), which includes 15 per cent of the population aged 85 and over (Laing, 2018) and forms the focus of Chapter 8 (comparable typologies are seen in the Housing our Ageing Population: Panel for Innovation (HAPPI) report, written by Barac and Park, 2009, p 2 (see Glossary) and Park and Porteus, 2018, p 131).
This chapter focuses on mainstream housing, where housing type, tenure, standards and markets embed individual housing histories. It begins with a reflection on housing development during the 20th century to contextualise environments of ageing identified through the English Housing Survey. Then it moves to the built environment and housing policy, reflecting on how building regulations affect housing design. Issues regarding inclusive design and how dwellings seen as non-ableing could be retrofitted or adapted are discussed alongside the growing development of assistive technology. The chapter ends with further reflections on housing as home, the impact of receiving care in current housing and how older people are becoming involved in co-designing future housing. This sets the scene for the empirical research that is featured in Chapter 6, where general housing is considered with regard to the meaning of home.
