Networked everyday lives in the ‘care-full’ city: A framework for examining the complexities of immigrants living with dementia, carepartners, and care workers

ABSTRACT

The ways in which people living with dementia (PLWD) care and are cared for in urban and suburban environments is not fully understood. Specifically, there is limited research on the impact neighborhoods have on the intersectional experiences of well-being for PLWD and their formal and informal caregivers—particularly for immigrants, women, and those living in under-resourced suburban areas. Writing from the geographical context of the inner suburb of Scarborough in Toronto, Canada, we present a framework for understanding the everyday complexities of care practices in this triad of individuals—PLWDs, care partners, and care workers—that considers their diverse practices, contexts, identities, and relations through time. Documenting these networks of caring complexities, represented in social and spatial ways, can disrupt the ways in which neoliberalism has relegated the understanding of care to be a highly gendered and racialized problem, as well as an individual problem to be solved by the free market, and to be contained in the home between family members (not in the public community realm).

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• urban
• networks
• dementia

Acknowledgments

We want to sincerely thank the participants involved in our study examining the care networks in immigrants living with dementia in Scarborough, Canada. We also want to thank Advisory Committee members Dr. Ranu Basu and Debbie Keay for their support with this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We affirm that people living with dementia are not a homogenous group, however we use this acronym to save space throughout the paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Samantha Biglieri

Samantha Biglieri (she/her) is an assistant professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University and Director of the Health, Access + Planning Lab. As a Registered Professional Planner, her research uses critical approaches at the intersection of planning and health/wellbeing, making connections with practice to build inclusive and accessible communities.

Justine Bochenek

Justine Bochenek (she/they) works as the Research Coordinator at the Health, Access + Planning Lab, where they provide research assistance and project management support on several research projects. Her own research interests lie in accessibility planning, disability, cultural planning, arts and culture, equitable public engagement, and social justice. Justine holds a Master’s of Planning from Toronto Metropolitan University.

Salma Abdalla

Salma Abdalla (she/her) is pursuing her PhD in Planning at the University of Waterloo. Her research explores the barriers and facilitators to seeking/nurturing a sense of identity and belonging in place, particularly for Muslim women in Mississauga. She holds a Master’s of Planning from Toronto Metropolitan University and is a Research Assistant in the Health, Access + Planning Lab.

Maxwell Hartt

Maxwell Hartt (he/him) is an associate professor in the Department of Geography and Planning and the director of the Population and Place Research Lab at Queen’s University. His research focuses on planning for demographic change in cities, with specific interest in the processes and planning implications of shrinking and aging populations.

Kimberly J. Lopez

Kimberly J. Lopez (she/her) critically examines social structures that reinforce difference and marginalization. As a community-engaged qualitative scholar, Lopez values working collaboratively and creatively to know more about: leisure and self-care in caring work, invisibility in caring labor, aging well in long-term care homes, leisure in and through helping professions, and digital leisure technologies. Kim works as an Associate Professor in the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies in the Faculty of Health at the University of Waterloo.

Roger Keil

Roger Keil (he/him) is a distinguished research professor, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto and a fellow of CIFAR’s program Humanity’s Urban Future. He researches global suburbanization, cities and infectious disease, urban political ecology, and regional governance.

Rachel Weldrick

Rachel Weldrick (she/they) is a critical social gerontologist & housing scholar with a focus on inclusive neighborhoods and housing for people of all ages. Throughout her work, Rachel prioritizes participatory research, community-based methods, collaborative development of knowledge mobilization outputs, and mixed methods. Rachel is an affiliated researcher with the Health, Access + Planning Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University.