'Enabling places': Rethinking 'community' in ageing-in-community in Beijing, China.

Objective(s): To understand how community as 'enabling places' is experienced by older people and brings about enabling resources for supporting ageing in community (AIC).

Methods: From a health geographical perspective, we conceptualize community as enabling places that are produced by the interaction of material, social, and symbolic resources. Focusing on a community-based care centre (CBCC) in Beijing, China, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 17 older persons to examine how a CBCC enabled AIC.

Results: The CBCC site created three interdependent spaces and material/social/affective resources for enabling AIC: (1)living space (residential care beds) to create a sense of connection and safety; (2) a CBCC-supported care space at home to create an atmosphere of trust and safety; and (3) a social space to create feelings of belonging and contribution. Variations in how the three resources interacted produced not only different spaces at the same site for various users but also different AIC experiences for the same user.

Conclusions: Community is not simply a static research context or spatial container. Rather, community as an enabling place involves a dynamic process in which spatial/social/affective resources are encountered and interact. Older people's AIC experiences change as their encounters change in the three types of resources we described and thus their capacities for ageing well change correspondingly. Furthermore, the binary idea of community versus institution needs to be expanded to explore how home, community, and institution are related, in order to create enabling spaces for AIC.