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Place Familiarity and Community Ageing-with-Place in Urban Neighbourhoods

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Book cover Building Resilient Neighbourhoods in Singapore

Part of the book series: Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements ((ACHS))

Abstract

Successful ageing requires the active involvement of society and the concomitant self-responsibility for keeping healthy in old age. Resilience, both at the individual and community level, is an important component of successful ageing. A life-course perspective of active ageing which considers the temporal evolvement of an elderly person over a lifetime, and not simply a snapshot account of old age, is needed to integrate time and place as a singular space relative to older adults’ experience of their living environment. With this perspective, beyond the usual agency framing of individual resilience at old age, community support of active ageing becomes quintessential as a part of the collective resilience of urban neighbourhoods. Here, place familiarity is crucial in engendering psychosocial and urban resilience, which affects seniors’ wellbeing. At the individual level, this community-oriented approach to active ageing operates as a wellspring to draw upon against adversities, and collectively as part and parcel of resilience building at the neighbourhood level. This paper illustrates the close association between place and active ageing in contributing to older adults’ experience of highrise, high-density urban neighbourhoods that are common to Singapore. It advances the concept of collective urban and psychosocial resilience.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In field theory, Kurt Lewin used lifespace to describe “the order of coexisting facts in a psychological or social situation” (Lewin and Lorsch 1939, p. 401). This essay expands its origin as a psychosocial attribute to include the geophysical environment and spatial experiences. It further advocates a collective multi-agent dimension beyond the individual agency view of lifespace.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Ageing Research in the Environment, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    John Chye Fung

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  1. John Chye Fung
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Correspondence to John Chye Fung .

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  1. Institute of Policy Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Chan-Hoong Leong

  2. Centre for Sustainable Asian Cities, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Lai-Choo Malone-Lee

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Fung, J.C. (2020). Place Familiarity and Community Ageing-with-Place in Urban Neighbourhoods. In: Leong, CH., Malone-Lee, LC. (eds) Building Resilient Neighbourhoods in Singapore. Advances in 21st Century Human Settlements. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-7048-9_8

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