Seniors in the City: On the Periphery of a Big Issue

In this article the author presents the outcome of the first `qualitative' stage of the project `Old Age in Space: Regeneration, Gentrification and Social Exclusion as New Issues of Environmental Gerontology'. She responds to research questions on how seniors residing in urban centres interpret the town environment, contemporary urban processes, ageing and old age, and how they maintain control over their situation given their state of health, physical performance, financial resources, and the specific spatial resources of urban neighbourhoods (personal strategies). In the article the author briefly sums up the theoretical starting points of the issue, describes the focus and methodology of the research project, and presents the research's findings on changes to urban space, population structure, local social networks and seniors' attachment-to-place. In the conclusion the author highlights the importance of research on old age or the elderly and on the urban environment being open and free of ageist and anti-urbanist tendencies, and she outlines directions of further study in gerontosociology and urban sociology. Reprinted by permission of the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic