{"title":"Community Building Through Place-Making Activities: Older Landscapers in a Singaporean Residential Town.","authors":"Benny Tong","doi":"10.1007/s10823-024-09499-5","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper explores how some older residents in B Town, a residential estate in northern Singapore, engage in community building through their 'serious leisure' and 'devotee work' participation in a resident landscaper program. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from February to November 2020 with participants aged from 60 to 81, I analyze how they built connections with each other, and the wider B Town community, through their participation. Particularly, I examine how the shared identity marker of being former farmers in now-evicted kampungs (villages) before the 1980s drew them together, and informed their continued involvement as resident landscapers. The 'kampung spirit' that they built up through the program enabled the construction of not only social connections, but also exclusionary mechanisms that prevented more older adults from engaging in the activities. These findings highlight participants' agency, and complicate static and/or monolithic conceptualizations of 'aging in place/the community' and 'active aging'.</p>","PeriodicalId":46921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-024-09499-5","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/2/29 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"GERONTOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper explores how some older residents in B Town, a residential estate in northern Singapore, engage in community building through their 'serious leisure' and 'devotee work' participation in a resident landscaper program. Using data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted from February to November 2020 with participants aged from 60 to 81, I analyze how they built connections with each other, and the wider B Town community, through their participation. Particularly, I examine how the shared identity marker of being former farmers in now-evicted kampungs (villages) before the 1980s drew them together, and informed their continued involvement as resident landscapers. The 'kampung spirit' that they built up through the program enabled the construction of not only social connections, but also exclusionary mechanisms that prevented more older adults from engaging in the activities. These findings highlight participants' agency, and complicate static and/or monolithic conceptualizations of 'aging in place/the community' and 'active aging'.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology is an international and interdisciplinary journal providing a forum for scholarly discussion of the aging process and issues of the aged throughout the world. The journal emphasizes discussions of research findings, theoretical issues, and applied approaches and provides a comparative orientation to the study of aging in cultural contexts The core of the journal comprises a broad range of articles dealing with global aging, written from the perspectives of history, anthropology, sociology, political science, psychology, population studies, health/biology, etc. We welcome articles that examine aging within a particular cultural context, compare aging and older adults across societies, and/or compare sub-cultural groupings or ethnic minorities within or across larger societies. Comparative analyses of topics relating to older adults, such as aging within socialist vs. capitalist systems or within societies with different social service delivery systems, also are appropriate for this journal. With societies becoming ever more multicultural and experiencing a `graying'' of their population on a hitherto unprecedented scale, the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology stands at the forefront of one of the most pressing issues of our times.