Intergenerational Contact Zones

Place-based Strategies for Promoting Social Inclusion and Belonging

Matthew Kaplan, Leng Leng Thang, Mariano Sánchez, Jaco Hoffman, Matthew Kaplan, Leng Leng Thang, Mariano Sánchez, Jaco Hoffman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367189037
• eBook ISBN: 9780429581533
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Intergenerational Contact Zones, Kaplan, Thang, Sánchez, and Hoffman introduce novel ways of thinking, planning, and designing intergenerationally enriched environments. Filled with vivid examples of how ICZs breathe new life into communities and social practices, this important volume focuses on practical descriptions of ways in which practitioners and researchers could translate and infuse the notion of ICZ into their work.

The ICZ concept embraces generation and regeneration of community life, parks and recreational locations, educational environments, residential settings and family life, and national and international contexts for social development. With its focus on creating effective and meaningful intergenerational settings, it offers a rich how-to toolkit to help professionals and user groups as they begin to consider ways to develop, activate, and nurture intergenerational spaces.

Intergenerational Contact Zones will be essential reading for academics and researchers interested in human development, aging, and society, as well as practitioners, educators, and policy makers interested in intergenerational gathering places from an international perspective.

PART I

Generation/Regeneration of Community Life

1

Culture as Animator of Intergenerational Gathering Places

Robert H. McNulty

The value of arts and cultural institutions for intergenerational gathering places depends not only on their specific design, but also on how they “animate” diverse gatherings of young and old to associate and mingle. Through this programming, they become “civic glue” and reward any location.

Engaging Older Adults

Americans are enjoying longer and healthier lives. By 2030, all baby boomers will be over the age of 65 and make up 21 percent of the U.S. population, compared with 15 percent in 2018. In 2035, America will meet another milestone when the population aged 65 and over is projected to be 78 million, and for the first time in U.S. history older adults will outnumber children under age 18 (U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, 2018).

The vast majority of Americans want to remain in their communities as they age. Contrary to popular belief, only a small minority actually move to warmer climates upon retirement. In 2010, only 3.1 percent (1.3 million) of those age 65 and over lived in skilled-nursing facilities (U.S. Department of Commerce Economics and Statistics Administration, 2011). Instead, most Americans choose to age in place, within the same communities where they have long lived. Every community, from fast-growing suburbs to more stable rural areas, will have to adapt to a maturing population.

Although most residents want to age in place, they confront many barriers to staying active and engaged in their communities. The following are some of the most common barriers:

1. A lack of affordable and appropriate housing options.
2. Few opportunities for walking, bicycling or other forms of physical activity, making it more difficult to remain healthy and engaged.
3. Inadequate mobility options.
4. Limited information about available health and supportive services in their community.
5. Concerns about the safety and security of the community.
6. Limited opportunities for civic participation, including meaningful prospects for volunteer service and employment.

These challenges to aging in place are community-wide concerns that affect residents of all ages and abilities. On a positive note, communities of all shapes and sizes – big cities and counties, medium-size cities, small towns, rural townships, rural counties, suburban bedroom communities, and edge cities – are implementing creative solutions to meet the challenges of a maturing America.

Culture, Place, and Intergenerational Exchanges

What Partners for Livable Communities believes, and what recent studies are showing, is that effectively highlighting the culture and heritage of a place cultivates attachment to that place, and thus makes people want to settle in that area and lay down their roots. Heritage assets can include a wide variety of community amenities including, parks, squares, plazas, and historically preserved neighborhoods. It is in these places that the renewal of American cities is taking place today, and culture and heritage are at the heart of this renewal. More and more, residents want to preserve the community gathering places that existed in the past, places that provide the nodes of community exchange and that thus hold the most value to their cities.

Box 1.1

Arts and cultural institutions are often the nexus for exchanges between patrons of all ages. This type of intergenerational animation is an indicator of both a community’s quality of life as well as its economic competitiveness. Culture embraces a broad range of activities and programs that allow individuals to creatively express their identity and history.

As the baby boom generation ages, the demand for arts and cultural activities will grow. Participation in arts and culture programs has proven health benefits for older adults. However, most communities are unprepared for the coming demand. Providing a range of arts and culture programs attuned to older adults’ interests and abilities requires partnerships with youth programs to foster intergenerational learning, as well as with universities, senior centers, libraries, and other groups and institutions. Providing these opportunities can also build a powerful advocacy voice in the community for more funding to libraries, parks, and schools.

Local governments can encourage and help fund programs that use arts and cultural activities to bring together different generations and cultural groups. For example, many programs use theater as a tool to educate the community about cultural and generational differences. Some programs, such as that of San Francisco’s Planning for Elders in the Central City, use theater as an educational and advocacy tool on issues such as health care and housing. By encouraging partnerships between repertory theaters, artists, and community organizations and agencies serving older adults, local governments can create new opportunities to fund and increase the relevance of arts and cultural programs in the community.

What Matters Most

A 2010 major U.S. study undertaken by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Why People Love Where They Live and Why it Matters: A National Perspective, surveys what sorts of resources provide total attachment of people to a community and make them want to put down roots, build a life, and work together to make it better (Knight Foundation, 2010).

Knight and Gallup (Knight Foundation, 2010) found three elements that were most important: 1) an area’s physical beauty, the preservation of its historic open spaces and buildings; 2) opportunities for socialization; and 3) a community’s openness to all people including “new” comers.

According to Why People Love Where They Live and Why it Matters, what attaches residents to their communities doesn’t change much from place to place. While one might expect the drivers of attachment would be different in Miami from those in Macon, GA, in fact the main drivers of attachment differ little across communities. Whether you live in San Jose, CA, or State College, PA, the things that connect you to your community are generally the same. When examining each factor in the study and its relationship to attachment, the same items rise to the top, year after year:

1. Aesthetics – The physical beauty of the community including the availability of parks and green spaces.
2. Social offerings – Places for people to meet each other and the feeling that people in the community care about each other.
3. Openness – How welcoming the community is to different types of people, including families with young children, minorities and talented college graduates.

Institutions as Fulcrums for Change

Traditional institutions already embedded in many communities – such as libraries, faith congregations, heritage organizations, universities, community colleges, museums, zoos, aquariums, botanic gardens, and arts and humanities agencies – can take on new roles of social service and economic development to address emerging challenges. As such, they become new resources for a caring community.

1. Libraries can become anchor tenants in downtown revitalization programs.
2. Parks and recreation departments can be health and welfare delivery centers.
3. Historical societies can help launch goal-setting agendas with their communities.
4. Universities in partnership with towns can become research and policy centers that help solve urban problems.
5. Museums can be neutral meeting grounds to discuss explosive issues such as racism.

Best Practices

The Queens Museum: Breaking Barriers, Redefining Access to the Arts

[www.queensmuseum.org]

The Queens Museum, housed in the iconic World’s Fair building of 1939, is set in the nation’s most diverse neighborhood that is home to more than 200 spoken languages: Queens, New York. The Museum’s mission, “to present the highest quality visual arts and educational programming for people in the New York metropolitan area, and particularly for the residents of Queens, a uniquely diverse ethnic, cultural and international community,” rings true to its invaluable presence in the community. Since 2005, the Museum has re-dedicated and expanded its outreach education endeavors by establishing a museum department titled The Queens Museum of Art in the Community. Today, the Queens Museum is the marriage of form and function. Expansive, light-filled space houses ambitious exhibitions, forward-thinking educational initiatives, and community-minded programming that engages myriad constituencies – residents, tourists, children, artists, individuals with special needs, families, seniors, and recent immigrants.

The Queens Museum works tirelessly to engage the community outside its four walls. Not only does the Museum have a full-time community organizer on staff working actively in the immediate Corona neighborhood of Queens, a position currently unmatched by any other art museum in the country, but also it provides numerous, ongoing partnerships to community organizations specifically within the immigrant and older adult communities. Catering to the diverse immigrant populations of Queens, the Museum hosts Passport Fridays, sponsored events showcasing a different country every week from South Korea to Colombia to India.

The Queens Museum with the Queens Public Library, one of the largest urban library systems in the world containing 66 branches, created the New New Yorkers (NNY) program – education classes to meet the needs of immigrant adults. The program hosts ESOL classes that teach English as a second language, and provides myriad multilingual research tools, citizenship materials, and arts publications.

The Museum operates as one of its feature community engagement programs: El Corazón de Corona or The Heart of Corona Initiative, a project that “aims to address the health of residents and to activate and beautify Corona’s public space.” The Initiative boasts several cross-sector projects created in collaboration with local health, business, and elected leaders: Beautification and Clean-Up (see Figure 1.1), A Healthy Taste of Corona cookbook, and numerous public arts projects as well as popular street festivals such as the recent 107th Corona Block Party, My Street My Home.

Figure 1.1 Volunteers from the Corazón de Corona project take a break during the beautification and clean-up of public space near the Museum. Courtesy of Queens Museum

The Corona neighborhood is an historic hub of ethnic diversity, home to such legends as Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, and Malcolm X. In the last three decades, Corona has experienced major demographic shifts aligned with national trends; the neighborhood has become home to a steady increase of immigrant populations. As a premier institution located in the heart of Corona, the Queens Museum engages as a primary stakeholder in the community to serve as a vehicle for community revitalization. With high-quality public engagement programs, the Museum promotes such unique initiatives as: The Immigrants & Parks Collaborative, immigrant-led civic engagement programs in public parks; and The Corona Studio, which curates new works of community-engaged public art to traditionally underserved audiences.

Beyond providing ample community engagement and recreational events, the Museum strives to meet many of the social challenges facing neighborhood residents through the umbrella art therapy program, Art Access which serves community members with special needs. An award-winning program recognized by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for exemplary leadership and community partnership, Art Access was launched in 1983 with a mission to “promote exploration through the arts and to highlight the creativity that exists in all people” (Partners for Livable Communiti...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• PART I: Generation/Regeneration of Community Life
• PART II: Parks and Recreation
• PART III: Education Settings
• PART IV: Residential Settings and Family Life
• PART V: Societal Development: National/International Contexts
• PART VI: Methods
• Conclusions: Some Lessons Learned about the Design and Functioning of Intergenerational Contact Zones
• Index