To demonstrate the potential of time in understanding older adults’ experiences of place, this paper draws attention to the everyday temporal dimensions of ageing in urban neighbourhoods. In this qualitative research, we utilise Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis to illustrate how the rhythmic orderings of people and place come into being and inform their experiences. Rhythmanalysis proved to be a useful tool in eliciting how the social construction of ageing in social policy, with its focus on activity and work, becomes embodied in older adults’ everyday lives in terms of how they value their own rhythms. The findings reveal how the contrasting daily rhythms of the older respondents and younger residents emphasise the slowness of the rhythms of later life. To counteract the negative connotations of these slowed rhythms, respondents sought temporal anchors that would enable them to experience daily life in their neighbourhood as eventful. That the rhythms of older and younger residents were not synchronised in time and space resulted in experiencing a ‘generational divide’ that emphasised respondents’ stasis in the neighbourhood. Our findings suggest that the everyday rhythms linked to urban ageing can evoke a sense of ‘otherness’ within a neighbourhood. In the future, a challenge for societies will be to prevent neighbourhoods from becoming ensembles in which older adults feel ‘out of sync’ and out of place.

In this paper, we focus on intentional communities in the Western world. These communities consist of a variety of groups, with different characteristics, ideologies and motivations. Examples are eco-villages, religious communities and communities of lesbians. These groups intend, at least to some extent, to withdraw from mainstream urban society, challenging norms of urban life, e.g. wasteful behaviour, stressful lives or heterosexual stereotypes, and create their own places in rural areas. Key questions that we seek to address in the paper are: What types of intentional communities can be identified? To what extent are intentional communities withdrawn from the rural areas in which they are established? We attempt to answer these through discussing the results of a survey among 496 communities. Furthermore, we describe an example of the ecological type of community, since these communities are most explicitly challenging urban norms and values. Copyright (c) 2007 by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society KNAG.

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Social capital has been a popular concept used in research and policy to stress the value of social contacts for the health and well-being of older adults. However, not much is known about the obstacles to and the opportunities for local social contacts in older adults' everyday lives. In this paper we provide a geographical account of older adults' social capital, by taking the main context of their daily life, the neighbourhood, into consideration. We draw on semi-structured and walking interviews with 17 older adults living in an urban neighbourhood in the Northern Netherlands in order to illustrate the meanings of, the obstacles to and the opportunities for local social contacts. Our findings show that the neighbourhood is not an isotropic surface where opportunities for developing social capital are evenly distributed. The potential benefits of older adults' local social contacts differ depending on the place of social interaction within the neighbourhood and expectations associated with these interactions. Furthermore, different time geographies of older and younger residents as well as ageist stereotypes of older adults' body capital influence the development of social capital in the neighbourhood.

In this paper, inmates in dormitories in a prison in New Mexico, USA, talk about their everyday lives. We are particularly interested in the ways in which they think about space. Their principal concern appears to be the definition of personal space in an environment where boundaries are weak. The paper focuses on anxieties about contamination which serve to define real and imaginary spaces within the prison. Interpersonal relationships figure more in inmates’ observations than does the disciplinary regime and the material environment of the prison. We argue that this has important implications for understanding space–power relations in institutional settings.