Introduction

This chapter focuses on older people's experience of social injustice, discussed here as oppression. We begin with a discussion of how ‘old age’ as a social category is being reconstructed before turning to consider the utility of oppression as a lens to explore the experiences of older people. Using the framework developed by Young (1990) this chapter considers the operation of exploitation, marginalisation, violence, powerlessness and cultural imperialism, drawing on national and local sources of evidence but more significantly on the narratives of older people living mainly in Newcastle. The discussion concludes by considering the work of Newcastle City Council and its partners in striving to make a reality of their age-friendly city commitment. To what extent do these partnership programmes create transformation or the possibility of transformative action?

Rethinking old age

While all socially constructed categories are in flux, the concept of ‘old age’, our understanding of what it is to be an older person, is now being contested and redefined (Hockey et al, 2013). In part, this is due to the greater number and proportion of people over 50 in global populations and the reasonable expectation that more people can anticipate living into their eighth decade or beyond. This in turn leads to a new landscape of later life that emerges as a multigenerational, highly differentiated experience that is impossible to encapsulate in traditional images. This has caused some commentators (for example, Clapham, 2014) to question whether age as a social category has any validity, though it is clearly still in common usage to determine access to a range of services and environments, which in themselves may be constructed in response to particular definitions of older age.

In response to the broad span of later life that might be some 50 years, new subcategories of ‘old age’ have emerged, with the most prevalent being the idea of the baby boomer. Much has been written on this cohort – in particular what might be more correctly termed the ‘first wave’ baby boomers born in the period after the Second World War – that has captured the public imagination with its, supposed, defining characteristics of individual choice making, prosperity, ownership and greater opportunities in the post work phase of life for self-actualisation. It is these characteristics that are associated with the concept of the ‘third age’. Against this background new agendas have emerged.