Elderburbia: Aging with a Sense of Place in America

New
Hardcover
2009
$95.95

An informed and often moving account of the crucial role of place in the lives of elders and what researchers and city planners are doing-and need to do-to make communities more age-friendly.

* 20 individual profiles of community development initiatives and design guidelines for elder-friendly communities, participatory research, and planning methods
* Excerpts from original ethnographic research on the sense of place and meaning of home, sociability design guidelines, and participation methods
* Graphics depicting elder-friendly community indicators and four domains of an elder-friendly community
* An extensive bibliography drawing on sources from anthropology, community planning, gerontology, and the broad literature on sense of place and phenomenology

Synopsis

An informed and often moving account of the crucial role of place in the lives of elders and what researchers and city planners are doing-and need to do-to make communities more age-friendly.

* 20 individual profiles of community development initiatives and design guidelines for elder-friendly communities, participatory research, and planning methods

* Excerpts from original ethnographic research on the sense of place and meaning of home, sociability design guidelines, and participation methods

* Graphics depicting elder-friendly community indicators and four domains of an elder-friendly community

* An extensive bibliography drawing on sources from anthropology, community planning, gerontology, and the broad literature on sense of place and phenomenology

$95.95

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 187
Edition: 1
Publisher: Praeger Publishers
Published: 13 Oct 2009
ISBN 10: 0313364362
ISBN 13: 9780313364365
Book Overview: With the first of the Baby Boom generation reaching the milestone of mid-life, the number of Americans in or nearing retirement age is both unprecedented and expanding. With so much emphasis on retirees maintaining good health and active lifestyles, it is also important to think about where they live, and how to make those homes and communities elder-friendly.

Media Reviews

A leader of aging, disability, and community based in Indiana, Stafford contributes only slightly, he says, to fuller discussions elsewhere about how American suburbs will have to be retrofitted for the elderly. His main concern is about the places older people call home, about homemaking in a sense of dwelling and belonging rather than cooking and cleaning. Among his topics are locating old age, memory and the creation of place, aging in third places, new forms of association in old age, and design guidelines for the new elderburbia. - Reference & Research Book News
Elderburbia couldn't be a timelier book, as planning departments across the country are in the process of evaluating the demographics and health and housing needs of their age 65 and older population. - Journal of the American Planning Association
[O]ffers a take on getting old that gets away from the dreary options that dominate popular discourse: fade away, unloved, in a substandard nursing home or exercise hard enough, eat right enough, and save money enough to remain middle-aged up to the end. Stafford argues we should be thinking instead about the importance of place, and he takes a close look at why some places work better than others in helping elders thrive. - Indiana Alumni Magazine
An anthropologist with a folklorist's sensibility, Phil Stafford has written a book that is unique in the literature of gerontology. Folklorists will appreciate Stafford's sensitivity to performance (formulaic speech and genre), artistry, and tradition, as well as the centrality of community and a shared history. . . . Stafford offers an especially thoughtful look at memory as a cultural resource, personal, but perhaps more importantly, shared. . . . This book contains some poignant insights into the experience of aging, particularly in the book's final chapter. . . . [I]t will speak to all of us who care deeply about our place in community, especially as we seek ways to age in place 'in its profound sense' . - Journal of Folklore Research

Author Bio

Philip B. Stafford, PhD, is the director of the Center on Aging and Community and the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community and adjunct professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.