Civic Ties
Older People's Views on the City Life: The Results from Age-friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire in Italy and Romania
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michele Bertani, Loredana Ivan
Cities are experiencing a demographic shift towards an increasingly older population (Eurostat, 2023). Aroud the globe, over 1100 cities joined the Global Network for Age-Friendly Cities and Communities of the World Health Organization (WHO), funded after 2007 when Global Age-Friendly Cities: A Guide was published. Domains such as health care and community support, social environment, outdoor places, and transportation are integral parts of the age-friendly agenda. The current work describes the process of validation of a quantitative assessment tool for measuring urban communities’ age-friendliness – the AFCCQ (Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire), with a focus on two cities: Bucharest (Romania) and Verona (Italy). This instrument consists of 23 items, which could assist municipalities and local authorities in collecting baseline data relating to their city using older adults' evaluations. Following a three steps protocol of cross-cultural validation, which included back and forward translation, initial face validation (with experts and older adults, and the final validation process, the AFFCQ-IT and the AFCCQ-RO were used to investigate older people's views on age-friendliness in the two cities. Data were collected from two samples of older adults (65+) (N= 424 in Bucharest; N=400 in Verona) and were interpreted using cluster analysis. Results revealed four categories of older adults (personas) having different expectations and evaluations of the quality of city life. We discuss the findings having in mind the link between age-friendly urban policies and social inclusion, arguing that older adults are a heterogeneous population experiencing different needs and challenges while aging in urban communities.
The Importance of an Intersectionality Lens for Understanding Older Women's Homelessness: Exploring Social Othering, Social Identities, and the Complexity of Everyday Life
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Judith Gonyea, Kelly Melekis
People experiencing homelessness have long been categorized into a singular stigmatizing identity of “the homeless.” This is also true for one of the fastest-growing groups among the homeless population, older women lacking stable housing. In this paper, we illustrate how society’s use of a singular “homeless” identity is reductionist and misguided. Drawing on our in-depth, in-person qualitative interviews conducted with older women living on the streets and in shelters in Northeastern US cities, we describe how the multiple marginalized social identities that these women experience based on being “poor,” “aged,” “women,” and often “disabled” are intertwined. We argue that the use of intersectionality lens is critical to both understand how these women resist and challenge these negative identities as well as how they construct a positive sense of self, particularly through their caring or nurturing roles. Through the voices of the interviewed women, we highlight the complex and inter-related issues based on the women’s multiple and fluid social identities, including the gendered nature of their experiences of financial insecurity, stigma, trauma and abuse, struggle to fulfill their caring role, and the interaction of physical and emotional health. We discuss how society’s social construction of the stigmatized “the homeless” identity must be rejected; rather, an intersectional approach offers a better pathway to understanding the multiple structural factors contributing to older women’s risk for homelessness later in life and will better inform the development of effective housing policy and programmatic solutions.
In Search of Project Marigold : Bespoke Fantasies of Independence and Dependent Sociality in Ubud, Bali
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paul Green
In this paper I examine how later-life foreigners and retirees living in Ubud, Bali, think about and strategise life course transitions towards a fourth age. Focusing on third to fourth age transitions, I suggest, reveals the ways in which historically constituted understandings of personhood are nourished in the social, cultural and economic context of specific retirement destinations. In this, we see how older foreigners develop individualised life projects in Bali, through virtues of geoarbitrage and privileged access to material and human resources. Drawing on an illustrative ethnographic example I highlight the ways in which such resources both support and compromise attempts by foreign residents to gain personal yet collaborative control over their future self’s engagement with care and support in later life. On one hand, the availability of local drivers, domestic servants and informal care workers encourages what I term as a bespoke fantasy of independence that extends over time into an everyday world of physical immobility, chronic health concerns and limited financial resources. At the same time, this individualised fantasy of personhood feeds into yet complicates a desire to find a sense of security and belonging in entrepreneurial imaginings of dependent sociality and small-scale retirement spaces. The elusive search for Project Marigold, I argue, reveals the creative and contradictory limitations of bespoke individualism in later life, with residents left to fear and contemplate a potential return one day to institutionalised care in their homelands.
