Navigating Dementia: Political Materialities of Public Transport in the All-Ageing Metropolis

Abstract

Age- and dementia-friendliness are major areas of contemporary urban policy and scholarship, seeking to maintain older people and those with cognitive impairment in their own homes and communities. Such work relies on architectural augmentation to maximise the functionality of ageing bodies and minds and has been criticised for conceptualising place as a static unidirectional determinant of individual disability. New materialist scholarship on place, ageing and disability is challenging such conceptions, theorising people and places as dynamically co-constituting socio-material ecologies that co-age and co-dis/enable. Moreover, a critical tradition is resituating dementia-friendliness in the materialising capacities of political economy in everyday public living with dementia. Building on that work, this paper reports on a yearlong creative go-along ethnography conducted with eight passengers with dementia on public transport in Greater Manchester, UK. Through interviewing, multimedia generation and map-making, their stories highlight unequal materialisations of (im)mobilities in relation to the fractious political economies of urban infrastructures in the all-ageing metropolis.