Wellbeing and aging in person-home-assemblages

Abstract

The home environment has been a central topic in the discipline of environmental gerontology. Home becomes the place where inhabitants' emotions and senses intertwine with their physical environment. As time spent at home increases with age, so does the importance of home environments for inhabitants' wellbeing. However, contemporary understandings of wellbeing within environmental gerontology have been criticized for their individualistic and human-centered approaches, treating the home environment primarily as a passive determinant of subjective wellbeing and neglecting the relationality of wellbeing in material, spatial and temporal contexts. This paper adopts a material gerontology perspective to conceptualize the relationship between aging inhabitants and their home environment as "person-home-assemblages". The aim of this study is to understand wellbeing in relation to aging and the home environment through these assemblages. To do so, we discuss the assemblage analysis of three cases. These cases were selected based on entanglements of transitional life events and changes in architectural environments. Each case combines data from an interview concerning an in-habitant's housing biography, an interview with the architect who designed the inhabitant's current dwelling, and material representations of the home environment. Our findings pull together aging persons, architectural spaces, personal objects, evolving landscapes and socially constructed housing ideals in relation to aging and wellbeing. Two primary perspectives emerged. Firstly, wellbeing emerges in fundamentally specific and situated ways from person-home-assemblages. Secondly, wellbeing emerges from person-home-assemblages while also actively shaping the evolution of these assemblages. These perspectives highlight how the home environment becomes an active actor and how home environments and inhabitants co-evolve and age together over time.