The question of what happens to people’s
sense of belonging to place as they age is a central concern among both
academics and policymakers, not least because of the rapidly ageing population
and the mounting evidence that shows that, as people grow older, become less
mobile and thus less able or willing to engage in an active way with their
neighbourhood, they are at risk of becoming socially excluded. Our research has
approached these issues from the angle of belonging by exploring how people
aged 50 and over, and living in or around a Northern city in England, experience belonging in their everyday lives. By ‘sense of belonging’,
we are referring to a sense of connection with and attachment to the
surrounding world; a connection that is often built on a sense of similarity
and identification with people, places and culture. What we would like to add
to the discussions around ‘ageing in place’ is a better understanding of the impact that time and ageing can have on
belonging and of what we have called temporal displacement.
Although previous research on belonging has largely focused on
geographical movement, for example international migration, or the effects of
urban regeneration, our research has highlighted temporal movement as an
important layer of belonging and not belonging. That is, ageing as an
individual experience, and the passage of time as a collective one, meant that
some people in our study experienced a sense of dislocation even whilst staying
in one place. This temporal dislocation frequently appeared as a kind of ‘belonging
from afar’, of feeling a sense of belonging to a place lost in time and/or of belonging
to a different time.
One example of feeling a sense of belonging to a place lost in time emerged
in the account of a study participant we have called ‘Harry’, a man in his late
60s who had been forced to take early retirement due to health reasons.
Although no longer working, Harry’s identity was centrally tied to the notion
of being a ‘good’ worker: honest, hard-working, diligent, and financially independent.
One way in which he emphasised his own identity was by distancing himself from
what he saw as an increasingly pervasive culture in his (relatively deprived) neighbourhood
of ‘lazy’ people who happily relied on the state to provide for them; of the
neighbourhood changing from a ‘great area’ to one that had gone ‘downhill’. Harry
strongly implied that this was a consequence of generational difference, with
the lazy ‘others’ mostly described as younger people. Furthermore, this
distancing and tale of decline came despite Harry also providing us with
numerous examples of extremely friendly and helpful relations with his
neighbours. As a result, Harry’s account of his daily life in his neighbourhood
and his overall estimation of his area did not seem to match. One way of
explaining this apparent contradiction came from looking at the point at which
Harry felt his neighbourhood tipped into a spiral of decline, namely when he
had to give up paid work. He seemed to be experiencing something that could be
called ‘belonging from afar’, which in his case is expressed as belonging to a
place (and self) lost in time.
While many of our respondents spoke of a general
sense of common feeling with people of the same age, the sense of generational
affinity seemed increasingly acute the older our respondents were. ‘Louise’, an 80-year-old woman living alone in a relatively affluent
suburb, was in the process of moving from the ex-council house she had lived in
for over fifty years to an assisted-living flat. This move was not prompted by
physical need but rather because her age peers had mostly died or left the area.
In describing this change, Louise did not use the same tropes of decline as did
Harry: she noted that the place itself was largely the same as were the type of
people who lived there. She also still maintained friendly relations with her
newer neighbours and in some cases had known their parents. Yet, she felt that
such relationships were relatively shallow because they were not built on
common experience; she wanted the company of ‘people of my generation’ with
whom she would have ‘common ground’.
Many of our older respondents also commented on their estrangement from contemporary
trends in fashion, music and consumer spending and an ever-younger ‘society’. This
did not necessarily translate into a sense of non-belonging because many such
people still felt that they had a niche in contemporary life, at least for as
long as there were enough people of a similar age who viewed contemporary life
and remembered the past in a similar way. For some of our older respondents
aged 80 and over, however, this niche was perceived to be shrinking. It was in
this situation, when their generation was seemingly slowly dying out, that participants
keenly felt a sense of generational belonging. We suggest that ageing potentially moves people out of a secure
place in the world in an analogous way to migration (but with certain key
differences, perhaps most notably in its partial but gradually growing impact).
Perhaps people more clearly notice their generational
belonging when their interactions outside the home, even when amicable, are increasingly
with younger people who seemingly embody a different worldview. For some of our
participants this, it seemed, could feel akin to living in a country that is
simultaneously foreign and familiar, and helped generate a nostalgic sense of
belonging to a time when they were deeply embedded in their ‘own’ generation. This
also spilt over into how people experienced the places where they lived as ‘generationed’; as reflecting the values and lifestyles of certain
generations over others and therefore offering a diminished sense of belonging.
Read the full article in Sociological Research Online here.
No comments:
Post a Comment