Aging

Dissatisfied with the notion that children and young people can be properly understood outside of their constitutive relationship with other family members and members of the wider community, geographers have looked to alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding age-based identities. This chapter looks at how emerging research in geography approaches the issue of aging and examines three related approaches to aging: intergenerationality, life course, and transitions. These three approaches are not necessarily distinct fields; indeed, they have more in common than separates them. They do, however, represent choices in the way geographers make sense of aging identities. The chapter then looks at the geography of aging, paying particular attention to cultural-geographic understandings of the spatiality of aging and the built environment.