ABSTRACT
The domestic home does not exist in a vacuum but is always connected to other places. Indeed, Moss (1997) maintained that the home represents both a fluid and shifting space – one that extends beyond the physical boundaries of the building itself to include community sites, spaces and amenities as well as friends, neighbours, those working within the community and so forth. Its relative location is, thus, important because it directly affects access to other locally-based people and resources that can support both informal carers and care-recipients. Hence this chapter draws on Moss’s extended notion of home to examine issues of community, care and support outside of the domestic (familial) home. In part, this refers to experiences of, and access to, such services as day hospitals and day care, lunch and activity clubs and so forth, that are provided by a range of statutory, private, or voluntary care providers. In part, it refers to the community itself. Community, here, is understood as both as an enabling geographical neighbourhood and as the social actors that makes up that neighbourhood. The underlying ethos of community care policy, for example, assumes that the local community within which care takes place will also act as a supportive ‘prop’ to its frail and ageing citizenry. Neoliberalising policies, in particular, have sought to address this through attempts to reinvigorate active citizenship within local communities. Such policies, then, presuppose that frail older people and their informal carers will be able to draw on local social networks as a means of supplementing care and support.
