IS OUR CITY ‘AGE-FRIENDLY’? BEING AGED AND POOR IN A SUPRA-CAPITALIST SOCIETY

Abstract

‘Age Friendly City’ initiated by World Health Organization (WHO) is now a buzzword in Hong Kong. The Policy Address by the Chief Executive 2016 promotes such concept. However, when the organic unity of the ‘city’ is ‘undone, dismembered and dislocated’ by capitalism(Lefebvre), it is difficult to make the urban environment ‘friendly’. In Hong Kong, a supra-capitalist society where the Gini-coefficient for households surges to 0.537 (2011), and 1/3 of residents aged over 65 lives below the poverty line, it is almost impossible to rely on the ‘Age Friendly City guidelines, requiring only minor adjustments on government policy, to enable poorer elders to live a life with quality. Using methods of ethnographic observation and in depth interview, our research has explored how older homeless people, ageing scavengers and illegal hawkers used the public space as a place for daily living, for earning their daily bread, for social participation and networking --- that means for life. Applying the theories of social gerontology, critical geography and urban poverty, our paper will discuss critically the spatiality of these poorer elders, their adaptation to the drastic living environment and tactics of resistance. Our qualitative methodological approach would not only offer an intense dialogue between the theories for interpretation and the empirical cases, it will also reveal the capitalist ideology embedded in the WHO Age Friendly City guidelines which excludes the older people of the grassroots class to lead their life in the public space.