ABSTRACT
Based on extended fieldwork on municipal intergenerational encounters in Sweden's second largest city, Gothenburg, this chapter investigates a core tension in the ways that temporality and age are reproduced through different age institutions. The city of Gothenburg offers a wide variety of activities that aim to integrate people of all ages. While these activities reproduce social time regimes that offer organizing mechanisms for daily routines, intergenerational interventions tend to crosscut different time regimes between age-separate institutions. This creates friction in the very attempt to merge age-based monogenerational time frames to create intergenerational and shared spaces for all ages. Despite being perceived as challenging to arrange in practice, both research and practice embrace intergenerational approaches as a ‘universal good’ that benefits ‘all people’. Intergenerational encounters therefore appear to be something that society should fruitfully engage in, but nevertheless avoids because of its demanding and time-consuming constellations. In an attempt to increase knowledge of these temporal frictions, the aim of this text is twofold. First, I reconstruct how different time representations generate contradictions and practical difficulties in age integration. Second, I explore the possibilities for a time reorientation within empirical research on intergenerational relations and learning. My question is: what age-based temporalities are represented in monogenerational versus intergenerational frameworks and in what ways could these temporalities be rethought?
