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The built environment, encompassing people's homes and the immediate neighbourhoods and communities that surround the home, represents an important context for older people's inclusion or exclusion. In this chapter, Atiya Mahmood and Norah Keating reflect on the centrality of place in the lives of older people. They conceptualise the built environment within the context of exclusion debates, focusing in particular on the ways in which the idea of 'ageing in place' is challenged by exclusion discourse. Several major policy and practice interventions that aim to enhance the built environment and thereby potentially reduce the risks of exclusion facing older people are reviewed. While universal design, visitability, and age-friendly city initiatives are judged to be valuable in addressing different dimensions of the physical environment, the chapter suggests that there is a role for research to review in more critical fashion the process and outcomes of such programmes.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the contributing factors which have led to the development of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC). It focuses on the influence of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) AFCC model, and explores a number of issues associated with the implementation of age-friendly policies and initiatives. The chapter further locates discussions about AFCC in the context of theoretical debates within environmental gerontology, emphasising the importance of such perspectives and related disciplines in advancing knowledge about ‘what works’ in respect of age-friendly interventions.

As a means of strengthening older people’s environmental relationships the age-friendly concept has been applied to communities, cities and larger regions. In the current economic climate, however, enhancing the ageing in place experience is a substantial challenge. The impact of austerity on such experiences has not been considered. There are also questions on how the diversity of people and place and community change intersect to alter the meaning of ageing in place, and how social policy can support such complex interconnections between individuals and place. This chapter explores older people’s relationship with place in the context of policy driven austerity, the economic recession, and the pursuit of age-friendly communities. The chapter demonstrates the worth of exploring how cultural contexts can shape the relationship of such factors. As one of the principle sites of the age-friendly movement, and as a well-documented location of economic recession and austerity, Ireland holds particular relevance to international jurisdictions.

Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the implementation of social distancing protocols to hinder the spread of the virus. Older adults, who are acknowledged to be vulnerable to the virus, were encouraged to self-isolate. This chapter explores the similarities and differences in the lockdown experiences of older adults in urban environments in the UK and the Netherlands by drawing on telephone interviews with 38 older adults. The interviewed elderly, in response to perceived risks of crowds, often chose to be in, and interact with, spaces at a short distance from their homes. Though this reduced mobility and hyperlocal everyday life might seem restricting at first, it could also facilitate ‘aging-in-place’ in the long term, as the elderly become more familiar with their immediate surroundings.

The first chapter provides an introduction to the book. It starts with sketching the background for developing age-friendly cities and communities. It then presents the aims and key research questions of the Volume as well as the origins and structure of the book.