Rhythms, ageing and neighbourhoods

To demonstrate the potential of time in understanding older adults’ experiences of place, this paper draws attention to the everyday temporal dimensions of ageing in urban neighbourhoods. In this qualitative research, we utilise Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis to illustrate how the rhythmic orderings of people and place come into being and inform their experiences. Rhythmanalysis proved to be a useful tool in eliciting how the social construction of ageing in social policy, with its focus on activity and work, becomes embodied in older adults’ everyday lives in terms of how they value their own rhythms. The findings reveal how the contrasting daily rhythms of the older respondents and younger residents emphasise the slowness of the rhythms of later life. To counteract the negative connotations of these slowed rhythms, respondents sought temporal anchors that would enable them to experience daily life in their neighbourhood as eventful. That the rhythms of older and younger residents were not synchronised in time and space resulted in experiencing a ‘generational divide’ that emphasised respondents’ stasis in the neighbourhood. Our findings suggest that the everyday rhythms linked to urban ageing can evoke a sense of ‘otherness’ within a neighbourhood. In the future, a challenge for societies will be to prevent neighbourhoods from becoming ensembles in which older adults feel ‘out of sync’ and out of place.