Spatialities of Ageing

The last weeks have been very busy, preventing me from writing new posts. However, last week a themed issue of Geoforum that I co-edited was published on the geographies of ageing. It contains an article about independent mobility in later life that I wrote about previously, but here I want to draw attention to the introductory piece in which we — Irene Hardill, Susan Lucas and myself — argue that (a) geographers should pay more attention to ageing and old age, and (b) the body and (spatio)temporality in conjunction with ageing should be theorised more explicitly. We argue that (geographical) scholarship on old age has generally found it difficult to strike  the right balance between the social/cultural and biological/physiological of embodiment in later life and to consider the spatiotemporality of ageing in all its facets. Drawing quite strongly on the writings of Deleuze, we suggest that his understanding of the body could usefully inform geographical scholarship on old age and that ageing and space are best thought of as  ‘entwined becomings’ — processes that evolve in close reciprocity with each other and that result in different dynamics in the experience and meaning of old age in different places. Sounds abstract? In the article we illustrate thes epoints with more concrete examples, drawing among others on the papers included in the themed issue