Gentrification Embodied: Access to and Movement through Urban Public Spaces for Older Adults

• In Event: 301 - Minority Fellowship Program (MFP) Research Session. Issues in Stratification: Health, Politics, Work, and Aging in Domestic and Global Context

Abstract

Previous studies investigating the challenges of urban aging have focused on safety issues in neighborhoods experiencing physical decline and high crime rather than the effect of growing affluence on older residents "aging in place" (see Newman 2003; Burns et al. 2012). But with the current “graying” of the U.S. population, many aging scholars and policy makers now view the urban environment as ideal for older adults who wish to remain in their homes independently for as long as possible. While cities offer advantages to older people such as concentrated services and shops that people can walk to without driving, gentrification can shape bodily experiences to intensify social exclusion based on age and growing physical limitations. Drawing on four years of ethnographic fieldwork among older adults in a gentrified New York City neighborhood, this paper examines older people's embodied experiences of gentrification and how changes in the built environment, often touted as residential improvements, reinforce social difference among people who tend to spend more time in their neighborhoods due to retirement, fixed incomes, and physical issues that limit trips far from home. I find that neighborhood changes such as the opening of new retail establishments not only lead to the loss of neighborhood places for older low and middle income residents that cannot afford their successors but can intensify social exclusion based on age and mobility. While previous studies have examined gentrification from the perspective of lower income people, this paper offers new empirical data on how the intersection of class, age, and disability shapes older urban residents' experience of gentrification. At a time when my participants already work to manage the physical self alongside cultural pressure to maintain autonomy and eschew dependence, they must also face how gentrification socially constructs age and them as "old" through their bodily experiences, and thus inhibits their engagement with gentrifying urban spaces.

Author

• Stacy Torres, New York University