Gentrification Embodied

• In Event: 432 - Regular Session. Impacts of Inequalities over the Life Course

Abstract

Previous studies investigating the challenges of urban aging have focused on safety in neighborhoods experiencing physical decline and high crime rather than the effect of growing affluence on older residents. While cities offer advantages to older people, such as concentrated services and shops that people can walk to, gentrification can shape bodily experiences to intensify social exclusion based on age and growing physical limitations. This paper draws on five years of ethnographic fieldwork among older adults in a gentrified New York City neighborhood and 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 spend more time in their neighborhoods due to retirement, fixed incomes, and physical issues. 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 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 and 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, UC Berkeley/ SUNY Albany