Where Is “Place” in Aging in Place? Transnational Issues for the Danish State and Its Retirement Migrants Abroad

Abstract

The aim of this article is to contribute a transnational perspective to the field of environmental gerontology and the concept of aging in place. Seniors from the northern hemisphere, among them Danish citizens, are increasingly adapting to transnational lives as they move to warmer climates. This article builds on a qualitative study among Danish retirement migrants regarding their experiences with the need for care or support while living abroad. Denmark is a welfare state with a long history of public nursing homes and in-home care for frail elderly persons. This system of governance is influenced by universalism, aiming at equality in terms of access to health services and care. However, these welfare provisions seem to be deeply embedded in methodological nationalism, since only citizens with residence within the borders of Denmark have the right to live in public nursing homes or receive in-home help. It is argued that we should consider public solutions to the problems faced by frail Danish citizens in transnational settings, enhancing their opportunities to live abroad.

KEYWORDS:

• aging in place
• environmental gerontology
• international retirement migration
• transnationalism
• Danish welfare state
• ethnography

Notes

¹This 3-fold model of aging related to place is applied in this text in preference to the widely used terminology “third” and “fourth” age (Laslett, 1989), which is also employed within the context of aging in place by, for instance, Geboy et al. (2012). The (1987) model from Litwak and Longino is considered more suitable for the issue of retirement migration because it relates directly to moving connected to the outset of frailty and because the popular use of the terms “third” and “fourth age” easily collapse into a dichotomy that tends to be oblivious to the range of functionality and frailty that can appear simultaneously in the process of human aging. This phenomenon of complexity in the aging process was pinpointed by Golant (2011); however, he did not position the discussion in terms of use of age terminologies.

²The word “independence” is examined and repeated in policy documents from both global and local fora, such as World Economic Forum (2012) and European Commission (2007), and, in a plethora of Danish local policy papers on municipal activities and innovations.

³This and other cases have previously been published in Danish in Blaakilde 2007a and 2007b.

⁴According to his wishes, Søren's name is not a pseudonym.