Moving Beyond ‘Aging In Place’ to Understand Migration and Aging: Place Making and the Centrality Of Occupation

Abstract

‘Aging in place’ has become a key conceptual framework for understanding and addressing place within the aging process. However, aging in place has been critiqued for not sufficiently providing tools to understand relations or transactions between aging and place, and for not matching the diversity of contemporary society in which people are moving between and across nations more than ever before. In this article, the authors draw from concepts of place and migration that are becoming increasingly visible in occupational science. The concept of ‘aging in place’ is critically examined as an example of an ideal where the understanding of place is insufficiently dynamic in a context of migration. The authors suggest that the concept of place making can instead be a useful tool to understand how occupation can be drawn upon to negotiate relationships that connect people to different places around the world, how the negotiated relations are embedded within the occupations that fill daily lives, and how this process is contextualized and enacted in relation to resources and capabilities.

Keywords:

• Migration
• Immigration
• Culture
• Theory
• Aging
• Place

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express a thank you to colleagues around the world for thoughtful and stimulating discussions concerning topics of place. This article is based on an international collaboration, which was in part made possible with The Toyota Foundation 2010 Research Grant, D10-R-0076 (PI - Asaba). We would like to express our gratitude to the Toyota Foundation for their support.