Supportive public policies are suggested as ways to lessen gentrification’s impact for older adults. While explicit policies designed to help older adults with gentrification are rare, literature on age-friendly cities is a close proxy. We utilized three North American cases undergoing gentrification: New York City, NY, and Denver, CO, in the United States and Hamilton, in Ontario, Canada, to present existing neighbourhood-based policies as social determinants of health in housing, resource access, healthcare, transportation, and communal places. Age-friendly policy application gap examples and COVID-19’s impact were included. Using a qualitative comparative case study method, we found policies were not specifically designed to address older adults’ gentrification needs. With the call for age-friendly designations, the role of gentrification in neighbourhoods with older populations must be included. We call for gentrification-specific policies for older adults to provide greater safeguards especially when events such as COVID-19 compete for existing, over-stretched resources.

Populist radical right (PRR) parties are often more successful in some regions of their countries than in others. However, previous research shows that the relationship between context and PRR support is not straightforward. We develop and test an expanded framework linking local conditions to PRR support through two causal mechanisms. First, we argue economic and cultural contextual factors can influence citizens by fostering a sense of perceived local decline, which in turn predicts both populist and nativist attitudes and, hence, PRR support (mediation). Second, we expect that citizens with fewer resources and stronger local embeddedness are more strongly influenced by the context in which they live (moderation). Combining geocoded survey data with contextual data from four countries (DE, FR, GB and NL), we show that the link between local context and PRR support is indeed mediated and moderated, providing a better understanding of the spatial distribution behind recent PRR success.

Transition intermediaries are expected to play an important role in the acceleration stage of the energy transition. While existing scholarship helps us understand the role of transition intermediaries in the early stages of transitions, it remains unclear what role intermediation plays in subsequent transition stages, especially at the local level where the implementation of policies and legislation takes place. In this article, we aim to investigate how intermediation takes shape in the acceleration stage of the energy transition. Drawing on the literature on transition intermediaries and intermediation at the local level, we explore the role of transition intermediaries in two local energy projects in the Netherlands. Through extensive qualitative research, we find that various actors can act as transition intermediaries and that a single actor can fulfil different intermediary roles simultaneously. Our findings contribute to the literature on transition intermediation and urban intermediaries, emphasising the key role intermediaries play in aligning innovations with existing institutional configurations. Furthermore, we highlight their role in connecting the energy transition to broader societal developments, including through citizen involvement in local and regional governance arrangements.

Drawing from 108 qualitative interviews with 38 participants from an ethnographic study investigating older adults' experiences of inclusion and exclusion in two increasingly socio-economically diverse neighbourhoods, this paper employs a queer approach to identify how older adults construct and narrate socio-cultural change in the neighbourhood, as well as complicate simplistic binary understandings of older adults invoked in ageing-in-place literature. Drawing on neoliberal, heteronormative and racialised discourses, older adult participants engaged in practices of ‘Othering’ to narrate who did and did not belong in the neighbourhood. Participants referenced three primary non-residents when narrating change in their neighbourhoods: the homeless resident, the temporary resident and the racialised resident. Participants generally ‘Othered’ these three types of ‘residents’ as non-(re)productive, i.e. as not contributing to the social fabric of the neighbourhood in normatively valued ways. However, even as participants engaged in practices of ‘Othering’, a form of exercising power, it was evident that some ‘Othered’ figures disproportionately affected older adults' sense of belonging to their neighbourhoods. We found that shifting socio-cultural dynamics related to class, race and age, especially as they relate to the temporary resident, posed the biggest challenges to older adults' feelings of belonging, and relationships, to place. Our findings indicate that an inundation of moneyed people and unconventional living arrangements can inadvertently threaten older adults' social spaces and networks, as well as further bound their possibilities for meeting the neoliberal and heteronormative expectations of ‘successful ageing’ by working against older adults' continued social participation and connectedness. In turn, this paper considers the ways in which older adults are exclusionary and excluded subjects.

Studies of ancient Mesopotamian cities have long focused on their institutions. Here, instead, the authors draw on recent investigations at the third-millennium BC site of Lagash (modern Tell al-Hiba, Iraq) to explore urban density, economy and sustainability at one of the largest ancient urban centres of the region. Drawing on excavation, environmental and remote-sensing data, the authors adopt a multi-scalar approach, revealing dense urban occupation, with subdivision into distinct walled quarters, as well as evidence for multiple foci of intensive industrial production and the exploitation of a rich mosaic of surrounding micro-environments. The study emphasises how a combination of new field data and alternative research directions offers novel insights into early urbanism.

This article defends the salience of situating Christ worship in the context of urban neighbourhoods and identifies some historical problems in conceptualising belonging at that level of society, akin to similar work on other levels of society such as the household and polis. An ekklēsia or collegium is, like all neighbourhood structures, capable of fostering or delimiting social interactions among neighbours who identify differently. A case study of 1 Cor 14.22–5 illustrates how Paul's model ekklēsia functioned in the context of the neighbourhood, and considers the impact of adding the ekklēsia to the street on which it was located.

Within research on ageing in neighbourhoods, older adults are often positioned as impacted by neighbourhood features; their impact on neighbourhoods is less often considered. Drawing on a study exploring how person and place transact to shape older adults’ social connectedness, inclusion and engagement in neighbourhoods, this paper explores how older adults take action in efforts to create neighbourhoods that meet individual and collective needs and wants. We drew on ethnographic and community-based participatory approaches and employed qualitative and geospatial methods with 14 older adults in two neighbourhoods. Analysis identified three themes that described the ways that older adults enact agency at the neighbourhood level: being present and inviting casual social interaction, helping others and taking community action. The participants appeared to contribute to a collective sense of connectedness and creation of social spaces doing everyday neighbourhood activities and interacting with others. Shared territories in which others were present seemed to support such interactions. Participants also helped others in a variety of ways, often relating to gaps in services and support, becoming neighbourhood-based supports for other seniors. Finally, participants contributed to change at the community level, such as engaging politically, patronising local businesses and making improvements in public places. Study findings suggest the potential benefits of collaborating with older adults to create and maintain liveable neighbourhoods.

This article reports on findings from a qualitative research study on natural disaster preparedness in ‘at risk’ population groups in regional Australia, and in particular on findings highlighting the key, and often unrecognised, role played by many older people in developing and maintaining local informal networks, activated repeatedly before, during and after natural disasters. The article outlines major themes in recent literature on community resilience and social capital in disaster preparedness, response and recovery, the design and implementation of the current study in which, 17 focus groups were held with ‘at risk’ groups across three communities and findings in relation to the role of older people. The implications from these findings are discussed in the context of community-based disaster preparedness strategies. Findings point to older people as critical, community assets in local neighbourhoods, contributing both their experience and relationship-building capacity to prepare themselves for natural disasters. In addition, there was clear evidence of older people sharing resources and experience in support of others of all ages in responding to and recovering from natural disasters. Older people in the research were found both to generate and mobilise social capital at a local level in disaster preparedness, response and recovery.

The National Dementia Strategy in England has performed an essential role in transforming health and social care services and improving the commissioning architecture. However, to date, little attention has been paid to understanding the ways in which the outdoor and built environment impacts and intersects with the lives of people with dementia and their carers. One way of better understanding the outdoor and built environment is through a focus on the ‘neighbourhood’ as this is an area of public policy where attempts are being made across disciplines to unpack its meanings, significance and identity. This paper adopts a realist review method to detail the key findings and messages from the body of work that links the experience of living with dementia to the neighbourhood. Our findings from this review are assimilated and defined/presented under three headings, namely: outdoor spaces, built environment, and everyday technologies. These headings and our definitions are not discrete properties and there is some overlap in content. We found no research that sets out to enquire about how people with dementia might define their neighbourhood or that explores everyday neighbourhood practices for those living with the condition. Emerging concepts such as citizenship and, in the UK, the Coalition Government advancement of the ‘Big Society’, promote a vision of civic responsibilities and networked, dementia-capable communities, but evaluation of such initiatives are virtually absent from the literature. The review did uncover some interesting and innovative research methods that extend neighbourhood working, such as the ‘walking interview’. In order to develop a neighbourhood model for dementia, future research should examine the relationship and interaction between the neighbourhood as a social space and as a physical space alongside the active role of people with dementia as ‘place-makers’.

The neolithic communities of central Anatolia are generally reconstructed as being constituted by relatively autonomous and homologous households occupying discrete residences and performing most domestic activities in the house. In this reconstruction households are seen as the uniform and unproblematic basic component of society. This paper aims to problematize this modular conception of central Anatolian Neolithic societies, and wants to draw attention to the multiple forms in which households occurred and the manner in which they were embedded in larger social associations. It is argued that different levels of social association can only be understood in relation to each other. Further, the manner in which social configurations in central Anatolia changed over time is explored. This will be done by presenting evidence from two central Anatolian Neolithic sites: Aşıklı Höyük and Çatalhöyük. In particular, we argue that households became autonomous and clearly bounded entities only towards the end of the central Anatolian Neolithic, and that too little consideration has been given to the neighbourhood and the local community encompassing individual households.