Introduction

The story of the 78-year-old Mzee Hafith vividly illustrates that place becomes increasingly important in older age. As a young man, he first worked as a farmer, moving easily between the village and the floodplains where he cultivated rice and other food crops. He then migrated to the city and became a petty trader, walking the streets and peddling his merchandise. As he grew older and weaker, carrying weights and walking far became increasingly troublesome. He returned to the village and his rice fields, until an advanced stage of his illness made him stop walking and working. Ageing gradually ‘pinned him down’.

This chapter asks what happens when older people like Mzee Hafith become restricted in their movements. What spaces of care become significant, or even open up, while others close down? Grounded in empirical research, it suggests a theoretically informed approach paying particular attention to the spatial3 dimensions of older people's ageing and care experiences.

Because the experience of ageing is intricately linked with the body, I use an embodiment perspective as a starting point for my inquiry. In the phenomenological perspective, an ill person apprehends the body both a) ‘as lived body (the body experienced at the pre-reflective level in a non-objective way)’, and b) ‘as objective or physiological body (the body apprehended at the reflective level as a material objective entity among other entities within the world)’ (Toombs, 1993, 51).