ABSTRACT
Why do we associate particular places with old age? It is, of course, possible to devise an inventory of the actual social settings in which older people find themselves and to explore the contouring, architecture, design and social structure of such real places – domestic interiors, city streets, holiday resorts, care facilities, long-stay institutions, bingo halls and so on – and to conclude that these have clear implications for stereotyping, both positive and negative. With Foucault to hand it is then relatively straightforward to theorise the spatialisation of age through discourses and disciplines (Katz, 1996). Some places are sites of struggle and resistance, others of accommodation and incorporation; some effect sharp boundary maintenance between second-, third-and fourthage domains, others allow easy slippage across generations. Each lends meaning to the ageing experience. However, my concern is less with the places where people age – actual or epistemological – than with the imaginative salience of such places, with what they stand for in the mind’s eye and the existential utility of those imaginings.
