Overview

Uncovers how people aged 60 and older struggle, survive, and thrive in twenty-first-century urban America. To understand elders' experiences of aging in place, sociologist Stacy Torres spent five years with longtime New York City residents as they coped with health setbacks, depression, gentrification, financial struggles, the accumulated losses of neighbors, friends, and family, and other everyday challenges. The sensitive portrait Torres paints in At Home in the City moves us beyond stereotypes of older people as either rich and pampered or downtrodden and frail to capture the multilayered complexity of late life. These pages chronicle how a nondescript bakery in Manhattan served as a public living room, providing company to ease loneliness and a sympathetic ear to witness the monumental and mundane struggles of late life. Through years of careful observation, Torres peels away the layers of this oft-neglected social world and explores the constellation of relationships and experiences that Western culture often renders invisible or frames as a problem. At Home in the City strikes a realistic balance as it highlights how people find support, flex their resilience, and assert their importance in their communities in old age.

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9780520288690

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Reviews

""Planning helps, but aging has a way of knocking the elderly off course, sending them into hospitals and ending their lives before they’re ready to exit this world. At Home in the City offers practical suggestions about aging and reminds readers that old age like youth is a 'social construction.'"" * CounterPunch * ""This is a trailblazing study.” * Journal of the American Planning Association * “Torres's descriptions are rich, warm, and respectful, and allow readers to recognize that elders’ neighborhood relationships consist of elastic ties rather than either weak or strong ties—terms commonly used to examine relationship networks.” * CHOICE *

Author Information

Stacy Torres is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the School of Nursing at the University of California, San Francisco. A proud first-generation college graduate, she grew up in New York City.

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