It’s For a Younger Crowd: Public Place, Belonging, and Exclusion among Older Adults Facing Neighborhood Change

• In Event: 147 - Regular Session. Community

Abstract

While community scholars have written about place, they have recently neglected place-based neighborhood ties in favor of viewing ties as “liberated” from local spaces due to technological advances that facilitate virtual interaction (Wellman, 1979). However, this trend neglects place’s heightened significance for older people whose social worlds “tend to be spatially circumscribed” leaving few options other than within communities to create supportive ties outside family (Fischer 1982: 184). Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork among older adults in a gentrified New York City neighborhood, this paper examines how three neighborhood places facilitated the associations that provide study participants with social support, especially important given older people's physical constraints in developing social networks. I also examine how face-to-face interaction and relationships changed after the study's initial site, a local mom-and-pop bakery, closed and forced customers to regroup in other neighborhood public places. By comparing the material features of neighborhood gathering spaces, I find that while different spaces facilitated relationships that supported participants' aging in place, they also reinforced group hierarchy and hardened differences among older people based on class, education, and health/physical mobility. Variables such as proximity (distance from participants’ residences), cost, physical design, and level of surveillance, shaped interaction and participants’ sense of control and ownership over the space. These features influenced participants’ likelihood of regrouping in these spaces and over time reinforced stratification among older people already working to maintain their independence in the face of gentrification and neighborhood change.

Author

• Stacy Torres, New York University