Reorienting vitality for ageing cities

Abstract

Measures of urban vitality as criteria for evaluating cities have limits when considering the lives of older citizens. Preference for ‘activity’ as a measure of vitality, increasingly through intensity of technology use, can be insensitive to both the slowing of certain activities or abilities with age, and neglect the ways in which technology, space, and agency co-constitute the experience of ageing. There is also insufficient attention among scholars of urban vitality on how vitality might ignore inequality and democracy. This paper will demonstrate how the concept of vitality, enhanced by both the humanism of critical gerontology and post-humanist perspective, can curtail the instrumental uses of vitality in evaluating cites and redeploy the concept to ensure spatial justice and democracy.