Abstract
Chapter 6 (Community Change) begins Part II, which examines impacts and implications of population aging at smaller scales, with reference to communities, families and individuals. The community is not only the setting for most older people’s lives but is also the site for responses to demographic and social changes through policies and programs. The chapter focuses on identifying implications of population aging at the community level, which calls for information about the two main processes of change in the numbers of the aged in communities, namely aging in place and net migration. Aging in place has become a major focus for policy-making, while migration is responsible for many of the uncertainties and extremes in community change. The ensuing discussion of these two processes considers explanations of them from empirical studies and theories, such as the ‘elderly mobility transition’, together with their consequences, including greater population diversity within communities and the growth and aging of ethnic communities. The chapter shows that diverse trends and rapid change are characteristic of communities’ experience of population aging, rather than the more regular accumulation of changes usually anticipated at the national level.
An increasing trend towards greater demographic and socio-economic diversity … [has] brought about a more serious focus among scholars on how changing population patterns shape the vulnerability and resiliency of social systems (Donner and Rodríguez 2008: 1089)
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Rowland, D.T. (2012). Community Change. In: Population Aging. International Perspectives on Aging, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4050-1_6
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