Intergenerational Space

Robert Vanderbeck, Nancy Worth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415855310
• eBook ISBN: 9781135008185
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography

Intergenerational Space offers insight into the transforming relationships between younger and older members of contemporary societies. The chapter selection brings together scholars from around the world in order to address pressing questions both about the nature of contemporary generational divisions as well as the complex ways in which members of different generations are (and can be) involved in each other's lives. These questions include: how do particular kinds of spaces and spatial arrangements (e.g. cities, neighbourhoods, institutions, leisure sites) facilitate and limit intergenerational contact and encounters? What processes and spaces influence the intergenerational negotiation and contestation of values, beliefs, and social memory, producing patterns of both continuity and change? And if generational separation and segregation are in fact significant social problems across a range of contexts—as a significant body of research and commentary attests—how can this be ameliorated? The chapters in this collection make original contributions to these debates drawing on original research from Belgium, China, Finland, Poland, Senegal, Singapore, Tanzania, Uganda, the United States and the United Kingdom.

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1 Introduction

Robert M. Vanderbeck and Nancy Worth

DOI: 10.4324/9780203736920-1

There is growing recognition of the need for research that offers insights into the transforming relationships between younger and older members of contemporary societies. In contexts across both the global North and the global South one can find commentators describing different generations as ‘clashing’ (Zemke et al. 2000) or ‘colliding’ (Lancaster and Stillman 2009) – or having the potential to do so – in a variety of sites and in relation to a range of issues. A large number of current social, political, economic and environmental concerns are characterized as having significant ‘generational’ or ‘intergenerational’ dimensions. For example, academics and policy makers frequently express worries about the future of the implicit ‘intergenerational contract’ that underpins the provision of social welfare (Marcum and Treas 2013); movements to combat climate change and reduce rates of natural resource depletion are often underpinned by calls for ‘intergenerational justice’ (Gardiner 2006); and many efforts to promote forms of ‘intergenerational practice’ (Moore and Statham 2006) have emerged as mechanisms to improve relations between the young and the old. Discussions of the sources of social and political unrest often invoke ‘generational inequality’ as an explanatory factor, such as in many commentaries on the 2011 London riots (e.g. Berry 2011). Although there is good cause to critique the language of conflict, division and separation that seems to permeate much recent public discourse about intergenerationality, the pervasiveness of this rhetoric is nevertheless indicative of the importance of research that offers new insights into contemporary intergenerational relationships.

The term intergenerational space – which forms the title of this collection – is most commonly understood to denote a site that has been designed for the purpose of facilitating and promoting interaction between members of different generational groups (most commonly the young and the old). These kinds of intentionally produced sites and spaces feature prominently in a number of the original contributions to this collection. However, the vision of intergenerational space we adopt here is also much more expansive in recognition of the inherently geographical nature of social life, a point frequently stressed by – amongst others – human geographers and other scholars influenced by the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social theory (Massey 2005). Spaces and places are not merely static arenas in which relationships between people transpire; rather, they are both constituted by and constitutive of social relations, including relations of age and generation. As such, the chapters in this collection approach questions of intergenerationality in relation to diverse contemporary geographical concerns. These include the relationship between places and identities; processes of segregation and integration; the socio-spatial organization of practices of care; encounters with social difference; the influence of cyberspace and new technologies on people’s social networks; and the relationship between space and embodiment.

In this introduction, we begin by first placing the study of intergenerational space within a wider academic context. We then turn to a discussion of key themes that cross-cut many of the chapters in this collection, followed by an overview of the thematic organization of the book and the contributions of each chapter.

Studying the spaces of intergenerationality

The term ‘generation’ is employed in a variety of different ways both colloquially and in academic discourse. As such, the concept of ‘intergenerationality’ is a complex and sometimes confusing one, given that it potentially invokes a wide range of different kinds of relationships, interactions and encounters both within and beyond families. Theorists of age and ageing have advanced a three-fold understanding of the concept of generation in terms of life stages (e.g. ‘child’, ‘teenager’, ‘middle-aged adult’, or ‘pensioner’/‘retiree’), membership of a birth cohort (which is often ascribed particular characteristics and dispositions based on shared historical position and experience) and positions within a family structure (see Hagestad and Uhlenberg 2005; Vanderbeck 2007). Although in many respects analytically distinct, these three notions of generation intersect within the context of individual biographies and, as argued by Biggs and Lowenstein (2011), contribute to the production of generational statuses that are not necessarily experienced or understood by individuals in terms of separate dimensions. Rather, Biggs and Lowenstein suggest, generational status is experienced phenomenologically ‘as an undifferentiated whole, all in one go, as part of who one is’ (2011: 6), and the social effects of life stage, cohort and family position are often not easily differentiable (if at all). While the question of whether or not generational status is necessarily experienced as ‘an undifferentiated whole’ is an empirical one that might be answered differently in different contexts, nevertheless in practice the significance of various dimensions of generational status can be difficult to disentangle. And, as we elaborate below, many of our contributors are not interested solely in a single dimension of intergenerationality but rather recognize how in particular situations multiple notions of intergenerationality come into play.

The diversity of usages of the term ‘generation’ (and, hence, ‘intergenerational’) in the social sciences has proven a source of critique, with some scholars (e.g. Närvänen and Näsman 2004) arguing that use of the term should be more narrowly restricted to provide greater analytical precision and avoid potential confusion. However, while we would agree that it is important that scholars delineate how they are using the terms ‘generation’ and ‘intergenerational’, it is not our goal in this collection to attempt to impose a particular fixed understanding of these concepts. Rather, we seek to provide a multidisciplinary (and often interdisciplinary) showcase for recent scholarship that attempts to address important conceptual, theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges related to the sites and spaces of intergenerational conflict, cohesion and change (broadly conceived). In doing so, we hope to contribute to bringing different traditions and strands of work into conversation with one another.

The idea for this collection originated in a conference hosted by the Citizenship and Belonging research cluster of the School of Geography at the University of Leeds entitled ‘Intergenerational Geographies: Spaces, Identities, Relationships, Encounters’ in May 2012. In organizing the event, we certainly hoped to attract some interest from beyond human geography in the discipline’s expanding conversation on intergenerationality, but we were pleasantly surprised that roughly half of the submitted abstracts originated from outside of geography departments. This suggests not only that issues of space (and other geographical ideas) are of potentially wide interest for research on intergenerationality, but also that there is a need for venues for these multi-and interdisciplinary conversations about the geographies of intergenerationality to transpire.

It has been argued that research related to age had developed in a highly compartmentalized fashion within the discipline of geography (Vanderbeck 2007), with quite separate literatures having evolved in relation to childhood/youth (an area of research that had seen substantial growth over the previous decades) and old age (an area of research that has experienced relative contraction). Despite an evident shared concern in these literatures with issues of generational separation, segregation and conflict, these literatures rarely spoke directly to one another. Further, while the tendency in geographical research related to age has been to focus on the ‘bookend’ (Hagestad and Uhlenberg 2005: 350) generations (i.e. the young and the old), the category ‘adult’ holds an ambivalent position. In one sense, ‘adults’ are arguably (and implicitly) the primary actors of concern in the majority of human geographical research (as is true in most other social science areas); however, their generational status as adults is infrequently problematized or conceptualized. Certain ‘adult’ identities and experiences are interrogated in relation to specific roles, such as in often feminist-influenced research on parenting practices and cultures (e.g. Katz and Monk 1993; Holloway 1998; Aitken 2009) or on the care responsibilities of adult children towards ageing parents (e.g. Bailey et al. 2004). Nevertheless, adulthood as a position and life stage remains somewhat under conceptualized in much human geographical research (Vanderbeck 2010).

There have been recent efforts by geographers to view age through a more relational, less compartmentalized lens (Hopkins and Pain 2007), and there is an evident growing interest in ideas regarding intergenerationality in the discipline (e.g. Tarrant 2010; Hopkins et al. 2011; Waite and Cook 2011; Valentine et al. 2012; Mitchell and Elwood 2013; but see Horton and Kraftl 2008). While other disciplines and research areas have their own specific histories and trajectories, a tendency towards compartmentalization in age-related research has not been solely evident in geography. Hagestad and Uhlenberg (2005: 346), for example, in reviewing scholarship on the theme of age segregation (which features prominently in this collection, as we elaborate below) note their puzzlement that ‘the literature … never combined an interest in both young and old’. There certainly remains scope for greater engagement and dialogue between social gerontology and childhood/youth studies (but see Hockey and James 1995; Settersten 2005, 2007). There are also established traditions of research on issues of intergenerational space that resonate with the concerns of geographers and with which there is greater scope for cross-disciplinary engagement. For example, the Journal of Intergenerational Relationships published its first issue in 2003 and routinely features work on themes related to intergenerational space, although direct engagement with the corpus of geographical thinking is not all that common (but see, for example, Kinoshita 2009; Mannion 2012). While one certainly can find many examples of interchange and collaboration, there is some truth in the claim that ‘the different disciplines which are engaged with the concept of generation, such as sociology, psychology, medicine, [and] geography, rarely cross-communicate’ (Biggs and Lowenstein 2011: 3).

Cross-cutting issues

Although drawn from diverse disciplines, contexts and perspectives, the contributions to this volume show evidence of a number of shared concerns. These cross-cutting concerns include the following.

Age segregation and the promotion of age integration

Many of the chapters in this collection share an implicit or explicit concern with patterns and processes of age segregation and integration. Age segregation has myriad social and geographical manifestations (Hagestad and Uhlenberg 2005; Vanderbeck 2007; Rogoff et al. 2010; Winkler 2013), including at the level of everyday interactions, neighbourhoods and institutions (e.g. the sorting of children and young people into age-segregated educational institutions, the placement of many older people who require high degrees of care into nursing homes, and the segregation of both younger and older people from workplace environments). Patterns of age segregation have been both produced and reinforced by approaches to urban and regional planning that have contributed to the production of spaces – such as city centres – that can prove relatively inaccessible or unwelcoming to people at particular life stages.

Age segregation has been considered a problem from a variety of angles. Commentators have suggested that although a degree of age segregation may be necessary or appropriate in particular contexts, the extent of contemporary age segregation has harmful social consequences. For example, age segregation – it is often argued – produces environments in which age...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Other Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of plates and figure
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Spaces of intergenerational encounter
• Part II Memory and intergenerational (dis)continuities
• Part III The negotiation of values, beliefs and politics
• Part IV Education, work and care
• Part V Intergenerationality and ageing
• Index