Making and unmaking ageing-in-place: Towards a co-constructive understanding of ageing and place

Abstract

In ageing policies and gerontology, ageing-in-place is often presented as an ideal, expected to contribute to reducing costs for institutionalised care and address the wishes of older people to continue living independently. In this chapter, we explore how a traditional environmental gerontological (EG) perspective can be fruitfully combined with a Science and Technology Studies (STS) perspective to study ageing and place. Combining both perspectives allows studying ageing and place as dynamic and interactive. By unravelling how older adults in the Netherlands construct their place attachment, we demonstrate how combining the aforementioned perspectives to ageing, place and technology shifts attention from interventionist logics of ageing-in-place to the dynamics of co-constructing ageing and place. Our findings illuminate how constructions of place attachment are intimately entangled with older people’s perspectives on different performances of neighbourhoods as meaningful places, requiring the revisitation of ageing-in-place as a mainly positive ideal.