Beginning with the premise that over half of the world’s older population already lives in urban areas (with a continuing trend in that direction), this book aims to further our understanding of the older person’s relationship with such environments in order to inform better social policy and practice. Given the nature of the urban neighborhoods that she examines, Smith’s primary concern is: How do older people respond to living in deprived urban neighbourhoods? To answer this question, she positions her own empirical study of neighbourhoods in the U.K. and Canada within a framework of “refocusing” the notion of the person-environment fit.
Smith divides her book into three sections. In the first, “Revisiting the Person-Environment Fit”, she reconsiders classics in the literature on person-environment (P-E) relationships. She provides a useful summary of key concepts and authors that also serves as an introduction for those new to this field. She pays particular attention to Lawton and Nahemow’s (1973) classic, Ecological Model of Ageing, and to Rowles’ ethnographic work and his notion of “insideness”. In Part 2, “Rethinking the Person-Environment Fit”, Smith describes and discusses an empirical study that she carried out in five deprived neighbourhoods in Manchester, England, and Vancouver, Canada. Finally, in section three, “Refocusing the Person-Environment Fit”, Smith considers how the P-E relationship may need to be re-focussed in light of current and future challenges. Additionally, she considers what influence this might have on theorising and interpreting the relationship that older people have with their environments and what this might mean for policy.
Smith’s opening premise is that environmental gerontology has been languishing since around the 1980s, with little theoretical or empirical progress in the intervening years. In particular, we have little understanding of cross-cultural and cross-national issues. Another significant research omission is the extent to which P-E relationships are significant within the multiple risks experienced in deprived inner city areas.
The author sets out to address these research gaps with a description of her research in three areas of Manchester (Cheetham, Moss Side, and Longsight) and two of Vancouver (Grandview-Woodland and The Downtown Eastside). These areas were selected on the basis of broadly comparable indicators of deprivation, and Smith has provided fairly detailed accounts of the historical development and decline of each area. Smith’s method combined profiles and interviews with 52 participants, and more detailed case studies with 8 of them. Pictorial and descriptive accounts of their neighbourhoods produced by two of the residents of Vancouver and one person living in the Manchester area are also provided. Overall, this collection of data offers rich and engaging accounts of the lives and voices of older people living in deprived neighbourhoods (and certainly ones that have been labelled as such by others).
Indeed, one of the great strengths of the book is the extent to which the voices of the residents are allowed to shine through. Mrs. MacDougall (pseudonyms are used throughout), a 90-year-old resident of Grandview-Woodland and still a local activist, eloquently describes what for her are the pleasures and ambiguities of “insideness” within a diverse but low-income community. Mrs. Fox, aged 78 and in poor health, talks about the loss of neighbourliness and with it her sense of security in her Cheetham community. Each case study brings to life something of the everyday experiences of growing older in places where challenging environments can affect people’s ability to engage fully with their communities and live a quality life. Smith also provides an analytical discussion on how each of these case studies relate to P-E theory.
The link between these case study accounts and the larger number of interviews, and Smith’s criticism of environmental gerontology’s theorising, lies in her analysis. Smith moves towards a cross-national analysis that posits a threefold categorisation of P-E relationships between older people and deprived urban environments. These three areas describe (a) environmental comfort, (b) environmental management, and (c) environmental distress. She bases these categories on an assessment: of the balance between environmental press/competence (the individual’s experience of that specific environment set against their own ability to adjust to it or to change it); evidence of individuals’ place attachment and disruption within and beyond the immediate neighbourhood; and the strength of the older person’s desire to move. The quality of life associated with these categorisations ranges from “good or very good” (environmental comfort) to “poor or very poor” (environmental distress).
Does this categorization enable us to re-focus P-E fit? Smith directly addresses this question, a little strangely perhaps, by first examining the policy context (largely in the U.K., and in the U.S., and Europe – there is little here specifically about Canada) and then by contemplating current and future influences on P-E relationships. In the concluding chapter, she re-addresses the issue of how her work has enabled such a re-focussing. This discussion re-visits her key empirical findings in relation to her three environmental categories. In doing so, she observes that there were more similarities than differences in the experiences of the participants in Canada and the U.K. This is an interesting and important reflection. However, we are essentially looking at two mainly English-speaking “western” cities that, for all their differences, also share many commonalities that in a global context might not apply to other kinds of cities. What to my mind is more useful is her drawing out of the complexity and temporality of how people understand, relate to, and work with the environments in which they find themselves, for good or ill, in old age. To her credit, Smith also states in this section of the book that her main objective was “to spark wider debate and present a forward look for academic research, policy makers and practitioners” (p. 188). In summary, the book provides much food for thought in such a debate. And, it will be of interest to a much wider audience than a purely academic one because it is well structured and illustrated, and written in an engaging manner.
