Ageing, Mobility and the City: Objects, Infrastructures and Practices in Everyday Assemblages of Civic Spaces in East London

Document summary

This article considers how older people inhabit cities in the UK, looking specifically at how everyday practices of mobility intersect with the formation of assemblages of spaces and activities. In turn, this work interrogates the parallels, convergences and divergences of these mobility practices with experiences and measures of resilience and marginalisation. This prompts questions on the role of a diversity of civic spaces in the everyday experience of ageing – including streets, squares, transport infrastructures and community centres – in the constitution of the city and the need for social, political and spatial accessibility for older people. How older people experience urban environments has been investigated within ageing studies, however, this research is yet to be properly linked to urban and architectural fields. Practices of mobility are key concepts and indicators of the accessibility of urban life, revealing the heterogeneous ways in which older people are engaged with and excluded from the city. Offering links between urban and ageing studies, the field of transport studies addresses ways that older people engage with the infrastructures, spaces and practices of buses, cars and trains. The study of seventy-five year old Elizabeth, living in the relatively isolated urban environment of Beckton in the London Borough of Newham, traces how changing assemblages of mobility infrastructures impact her everyday life as she accesses, contests and is excluded from urban spaces and practices. The variety of ethnographic and visual methods used, derived from architectural methods, in the study of Elizabeth and her mobility practices open up a deeper understanding of urban ageing.