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Designing Public Space for an Ageing Population examines the barriers older people face by being a pedestrian in the built environment and demonstrates how to overcome them. Drawing on research carried out across the globe, and framed around Bourdieu's theory of capitals, this book establishes how to overcome restrictions and barriers to mobility including: - Infrastructure capital, such as technology, services, roads, pavements, finance and economics - Social capital, for example friends, family, neighbourhood and community - Cultural capital (norms, expectations, rules, laws) - Individual capital (skills, abilities, resilience, adaptation and desire and willingness to change) The book demonstrates that the public realm must be safe and accessible, but also attractive and desirable to an ageing population. The book includes case studies presenting solutions around CABE's objectives of urban design, notably: safe and accessible space including ease of movement; legible space, including adaptability, diversity and choice and; distinctive and aesthetically pleasing space, including character, continuity and quality.

Purpose
Travel and mobility for older people has typically focussed on the practical benefits to the individual, for example, in meeting utilitarian needs of shopping, appointments and staying connected to family and friends. However, previous research has hinted that travel for its own sake, to get out and about and feel and experience mobility, may be just as important for older people and is especially missed when individuals give-up driving. The paper aims to discuss these issues.


Design/methodology/approach
This paper examines travel for its own sake, usually referred to as discretionary travel, interviewing 20 older people in each of three different contexts: for drivers, for community transport users and for non-drivers who receive lifts from family and friends.


Findings
Older people not only enjoy discretionary travel, but also feel it is beneficial to their health and wellbeing. The car and especially driving, is seen as the best way to fulfil discretionary travel. Community transport users do fulfil discretionary travel needs but these are over formalised and lack spontaneity affecting feelings of control and identity. Receiving lifts from family and friends can often result in older people feeling a burden to the providers of the lifts especially when travel is viewed as discretionary.


Practical implications
More needs to be done to ensure discretionary travel needs are met for those without cars, highlighting the importance of such travel to community transport providers and helping reduce the feeling of being a burden to family and friends.


Originality/value
Policy, practice and research has tended to focus on transport as a means to an end. However, older people themselves value mobility just as much for its own sake and just to view nature. Such discretionary reasons for mobility are actually very important for health and wellbeing of older people and need more attention.

IntroductionRoutine data sources are increasingly being explored as an alternative to surveys for governmental censuses. Censuses are useful, but only capture one snapshot in time. For research, changes in state over time can be important. This is particularly true for households, where changes in both composition and location are routine.
Objectives and ApproachThe Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) databank at Swansea University holds anonymised address data tied to Welsh General Practice (GP) registrations. The dataset has the individual's unique identifier (ALF), address identifier (RALF), and moving in and moving out dates. This can be securely linked to other demographic and health data.
Using this data, a finite, deterministic household model was developed. This model implements a set of rules for establishing, advancing, and terminating households. The rules cover different types of households, including transient and multi-generational, but not communal residences such as student halls or residential care homes.
ResultsThe model was implemented in Python, and operates over finite moving in/out transactions undertaken by actors (ALFs) on specific properties (RALFs). The roles also help to diminish data issues, such as infants moving into an address before their parents.
The model creates and updates histories of households for each RALF. This allows researchers to identify unstable versus stable households, or to look at possible environmental health factors over time.
The script also provides a running count of the total number of residents at each RALF at any given time. This makes it useful for time-specific research, or for linking to censuses.
Conclusion/ImplicationsThe ability to have a longitudinal record of households can provide additional detail to research which can be costly to obtain otherwise. This method shows promise as a useful tool for linked population data research. Further validation against surveys, and work to identify and model communal residences is needed.

The effect of the wider social-environment on physical and emotional health has long been an area of study. Extrapolating the impact of the individual's immediate environment, such as living with a smoker or caring for a chronically-ill child, would potentially reduce confounding effects in health-related research. Surveys, including the UK Census, are beginning to collect data on household composition. However, these surveys are expensive, time consuming, and, as such, are only completed by a subsection of the population. Large-scale, linked databanks, such as the SAIL Databank at Swansea University, which hold routinely collected secondary use clinical and administrative datasets, are broader in scope, both in terms of the nature of the data held, and the population. The SAIL databank includes demographic data and a geographic indicator that makes it possible to identify groups of people that share accommodation, and in some cases the familial relationships among them. This paper describes a method for creating households, including considerations for how that information can be securely shared for research purposes. This approach has broad implications in Wales and beyond, opening up possibilities for more detailed population-level research that includes consideration of residential social interactions.

Older people in the countryside are vastly under-researched compared to those in urban areas. This innovative volume, the first project-based book in the New Dynamics of Ageing series, offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on this issue, focusing on older people's role as assets in rural civic society. It demonstrates how the use of diverse methods from across disciplines aims to increase public engagement with this research. The authors examine the ways in which rural elders are connected to community and place, the contributions they make to family and neighbours, and the organisations and groups to which they belong. Highly topical issues around later life explored through these perspectives include older people's financial security, leisure, access to services, transport and mobility, civic engagement and digital inclusion – all considered within the rural context in an era of fiscal austerity. In doing so, this book challenges problem-based views of ageing rural populations through considering barriers and facilitators to older people's inclusion and opportunities for community participation in rural settings. Countryside Connections is a valuable text for students, researchers and practitioners with interests in rural ageing, civic engagement and interdisciplinary methods, theory and practice

While there has been a gradual increase in scholarship on men, ageing and masculinities, little attention has been paid to the social relations of men in later life and the implications for enhancing their social wellbeing and counteracting ageist discourse. Bringing together scholars in social gerontology and the social sciences from across Global North and South nations, this collection fills the gaps in key texts by foregrounding older men's experiences. It provides new perspectives across the intersections of old age, ethnicities, class and sexual and gender identity, paying particular attention to older men from seldom heard or marginalised groups