Understanding Daily Life of Older People in a Residential Complex: The Contribution of Lefebvre's Social Space

This article contributes to the theoretical and applied understanding of daily life and the meaning of home for older people living in purpose-built, age-segregated complexes. Whilst gerontology has embraced spatial perspectives, it often fails to capture their diverse and changing nature. This article considers findings from a larger qualitative study that explored the geography of residential complexes in Brisbane, Australia, through the lens of Henri Lefebvre's theory of social space. Data relating to Lefebvre's concepts of spatial practice and spaces of representation clearly capture the routines, activities, attachments and imaginations that help or hinder older people connecting to their living environment. Talking with older people gave a rich account of how they use, think about and produce space and highlighted the tensions in providing this form of specialised housing. As well as providing theoretical insights, a nuanced understanding of social space informs policy and public discussion of older people's living environments.     

Changing Family Tradition: Housing Choices and Constraints for Older People in Japan

The primary objective of this paper is to provide a qualitative analysis of the transformations in the housing choices and living arrangements of older people in Japan. The underlying causes and issues of changing intergenerational linkages were explored in the context of the development of the Japanese welfare state. The fieldwork was conducted in Kitakyushu, Japan, through a series of interviews with older women. The informants were selected from three different welfare sectors - the state, the market, and the family - in order to make a clear distinction among people in terms of their socio-economic status, housing and living arrangements, and degree of family relations. The results of the analysis highlight older people's preference for more independent living with changing family patterns and ideology. It is, however, still constrained by the limited housing alternatives and underdeveloped social services. The paper also reveals the extent of poverty among single women in old age.     

Industrially Harvested Peatlands and After-use Potential: Understanding Local Stakeholder Narratives and Landscape Preferences

Recent years have witnessed much debate on the turn towards community within landscape management and planning. This is particularly evident in the European Landscape Convention which asserts the legitimacy of local preferences and citizen involvement in policy processes. This paper explores a bottom-up perspective on people–place relationships in a changing landscape, through assessing the after-use potential of industrially mined peatlands in Ireland and the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes. The mining of the peatland resource has a longstanding tradition in Ireland, however, significant attention has now focused on exploring market and non-market uses of remains after harvesting has finished resulting in a cutaway landscape. We argue that local people's everyday experiences of the landscape is a legitimate form of knowledge and should provide a key input into deliberative planning and management processes. Drawing largely on an interpretive research approach, we assess key local narratives in relation to harvested peatland landscapes and explore local people's after-use preferences. There appears to be strong support among the local community for amenity/biodiversity after-uses, which are currently not reflected in public policy debates. We review people–place relationships and discuss the role of ethnographic research in a peatland context as well as defining the relevant stakeholders. Finally, conclusions are developed to identify wider lessons for people/place relationships within the context of landscape management and planning.     

Place Attachment Among Older Adults Living in Four Communities in Flanders,Belgium

There is strong evidence that age brings an increasing attachment to social and physical environments. However, the extent to which the experience of place attachment may vary between different types of locations remains underexplored in ageing research. Using a mixed-method approach consisting of two consecutive phases, this article aims to identify contextual factors that either promote or impede older people's attachment to place. In the first phase, quantitative data from the Belgian Ageing Studies were used to purposively select four municipalities: two with relatively strong and two with relatively weak place attachments among the older population. In the second, qualitative phase, two focus groups with local stakeholders and 20 semi-structured interviews with older residents were conducted in each of the four case study areas in order to explain and build on the quantitative results. The qualitative findings focus on two contextual factors that have been linked to place attachment: the physical–spatial environment and population turnover. The study identifies the various pathways between these factors and older people's attachments. The article concludes by discussing practical and policy issues raised by the research.     

Obstacles for young Swedes to find a home of their own

During the first years of the 1980s, one could see that young people in Sweden moved from their parents’ homes to their own housing at a somewhat older age than previously (Lundberg and Modig, 1984). In this article, these circumstances form the starting‐point for a secondary analysis. The problem can be summarized in four hypotheses: (1) A change in the supply of housing can have caused difficulties for young people in finding a home of their own. (2) More youth may entail increased competition for existing dwellings. (3) Young people's ability to pay for housing of their own may have changed. (4) A change in attitudes may have occurred towards giving more priority to stay longer in their parents’ homes. Young people of the 1980s are, without doubt, marginal persons on the housing market. They belong to a group who have gradually been deprived of their possibilities to find a home of their own. The number of small rented flats in multi‐occupancy blocks have decreased. Waiting time and queuing time for flats have increased. But young people today still have both a desire and economic resources to find a home of their own.     

Ageing in Unsuitable Places

Much of the focus of ageing in place policy is concerned with the provision of support to enable older people to age in the community in residences adapted to their needs. There has been little examination of why older people make choices to age in particular places in later life. In this paper, we drew on 143 interviews with older people in New Zealand to examine the narratives older people use to describe their housing preferences in later life. Older people drew upon personal and public narratives to story housing in later life, and construct four identifiable identities: ‘practical planner’, ‘rugged pioneer’, ‘where I belong’ and ‘rooted in place’. This analysis demonstrates that some older people do narrate decisions to age in ‘sensible’ places with good access to services and have clear plans for change as their physical health declines. Other older people live proudly in unsuitable places and do not wish for support to move or accommodations made to their housing. These older people draw upon narratives of place as foundational to their identity, of relationships with people both living and dead as social relationships that bolster their identity and of housing as part of situated lifelong narratives. Both the situation of their home and the condition of the home provide the backdrop to alternative narrative identities that require them to remain in housing because of, or irrespective of, its unsuitability. To understand the limitations and the possibilities of ageing in place, we need to identify the multiple narratives that structure the lives of older people. By doing so, we can support ageing in place processes that do not disrupt the strong identities that have been developed in and through housing.     

Housing Pathways of Disabled Young People: Evidence for Policy and Practice

Most studies of disabled young people's housing experiences focus on structural constraints, with little attention given to the role of young people themselves in shaping their housing biographies. Using Clapham's (2002) housing pathways framework, this paper reflects on new empirical data to examine interactions between structure, agency and wider discourses in the housing pathways of disabled young people. The paper develops a typology of disabled young people's housing pathways, consisting of direct, staged and return pathways to independent living. Within each of these pathways, young people face key challenges of deciding to leave, finding suitable accommodation and maintaining their accommodation. The research identifies some of the complex interconnected factors that shape the ways young people negotiate these challenges and in doing so key messages emerge for policy makers and practitioners. Moreover, the paper not only informs policy and practice but also responds to questions that have recently been asked of the pathways framework and social constructionism more generally.     

Exploring segregation and mobilities: Application of an activity tracking app on mobile phone

Increased mobility has posed a challenge to the study of social segregation which conventionally adapts a static view in linking people's source of identity and social interaction to confined spaces of their residence. This is a paper reporting an exploratory study in the use of a mobile phone app in tracking the mobility patterns of selected sample of people in Hong Kong. It explores the impacts of mobility on whom people engage their activities with, how they interact with people in their home neighbourhood and how much likely they would in interacting with people of different socio-economic backgrounds. Patterns of mobility are very uneven among people in Hong Kong and as a city of long working hours and heavy work burden, the time people stay in their home neighbourhood and interaction with friends are in fact very limited. There are also high opportunities for them to move to neighbourhoods with a different socio-economic profile with that they live in. Yet people from poor neighbourhoods tend to move to poor neighbourhoods whilst richer people to richer neighbourhoods. Thus pole may be mobile but interaction with other income groups may be limited. At the same time, the mobile phone app that has been developed offers a very robust instrument for social research which needs to track people's movement     

Newer Plant Displays in Botanical Gardens: The Role of Design in Environmental Interpretation

New design approaches can be observed in an increasing number of botanical gardens due to a desire to improve the effectiveness of environmental interpretation. This paper presents a review of these recent trends in the display of plants based on a search of botanical gardens around the world and on both theory and previous research findings that have focused on understanding people's experience in botanical gardens and other environmental interpretation settings. Four design strategies of plant display were identified, which are referred to here as familiar frames, icons, imitations and manipulations of nature. These typological categories represent recent design approaches useful for establishing stronger relationships between people, plants and associated environmental issues. Further, the potential of such displays as environmental interpretation tools is discussed based on how people perceive them.     

Children's education or parents' employment: How do people choose their place of residence in Beijing

Residential mobility has become an increasingly important issue in China, where urban families participate frenetically in the commodity housing market leading to soaring property prices. Applying place dependence approach and logistic regression models, this paper examines the association between residential mobility intentions and place dependence for employment and education in Beijing. The results reveal that people's intentions to move homes are driven by place dependence on the access to high-quality schools for their children, while the dependence for employment is rather weak. The findings indicate children's education has emerged as a new driving force that shapes urban space in contemporary China and therefore should be a focal point for planners and policy makers in urban resource distribution. This paper provides evidences to further our understanding of the high premium of properties that enable access to good schools. The needs for other spatial utilities and sentimental attachment to a place also encourage residential mobility intentions, which deserves further research.