Aging Under Infrastructural Strain: Civic Capacity and Cumulative Inequality in Later Life

• In Event: Contextual Influences on Well-Being Across the Life Course

Abstract

What does later life look like in communities where civic infrastructure has been unevenly accumulated over time? While age-friendly scholarship often emphasizes the enhancement of local supports, less attention has been paid to how long-term disinvestment shapes the baseline conditions under which aging unfolds. Drawing on community-engaged qualitative research, including semi-structured interviews, informal interviewing, ethnographic fieldwork, and interviews with nonprofit and community stakeholders, this paper examines later life among historically marginalized older adults in an underserved urban community.

Findings reveal persistent barriers rooted not in isolated service failures but in fragmented and inconsistently coordinated local systems. Participants describe recurring efforts to navigate unreliable transportation, disconnected health care providers, and complex or digitally mediated benefits systems. From these patterns, I develop the concept of infrastructural strain in later life, a sustained misalignment between age-related needs and the institutional reliability of civic systems. Infrastructural strain becomes particularly consequential in later life, when declining health, mobility limitations, and fixed incomes intensify reliance on nearby institutions while diminishing the capacity to absorb systemic breakdowns.

Under conditions of infrastructural strain, interdependence is reorganized. Community-based nonprofits and faith-based organizations become embedded within older adults’ relational worlds, stabilizing daily routines and mediating access to fragmented systems. Extending life course perspectives on cumulative inequality and linked lives, this study argues that uneven civic capacity itself functions as a meso-level mechanism of stratification. Rather than serving merely as context, local infrastructure shapes how inequality is carried, managed, and reproduced in later life.

Author

• Melanie Z. Plasencia, Rutgers University-Newark