Housing and Living Conditions of Ageing Populations

Coordinators

Marianne Abramsson
Department of Human Geography
Stockholm University
Sweden
Tel: +46 (0)8 16 48 29
marianne.abramsson@humangeo.su.se

Blanca Deusdad
University Rovira i Virgili
Tarragona, Spain
Tel. +34 977 558 358
blanca.deusdad@urv.cat

Central theme
The central theme of this Working Group is the housing and living conditions of older people.

Activities in 2022
In 2022 the WG organised a successful workshop at the ENHR conference in Barcelona, Spain, August 31st – Sept 2nd. The workshop received about 15 abstracts and subsequently 12 papers were presented in the workshop during the conference. The workshop provided a good forum for discussion. In the wake of the pandemic, this time only participants from Europe were present but from a variety of countries, Finland, Italy, Sweden, Poland, Spain, The Netherlands, France, Slovenia, the UK and Norway. It is apparent that there is an ongoing interest in ageing issues where housing and living conditions are high on the policy agenda.

Future plans and activities
The WG plans to be present at the ENHR 2023 conference in Lodz, Poland. Interested participants are encouraged to submit abstracts and papers directly on the conference website and are welcome to contact any of the coordinators for further information about the participation in the conference as well as the working group.

Other
There are no registered members of the group, but it consists of researchers active or interested in the field, interested persons and participants in the group activities. Several researchers are usually involved in the writing of papers presented at the ENHR conferences. The contributions that under normal circumstances are presented is based on  research from several countries in Europe, Australia, Canada, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

The ENHR Network provides excellent opportunities to meet researchers from all over Europe (and the World) in paper presentations/discussions as well as plenary activities and social events. From our point of view, this has become the main role of the network in order to facilitate meetings and cooperation between researchers. The ENHR has an overriding meeting and knowledge dissemination based role, which is an important role indeed. The working group is a regular participant in the annual ENHR conference.

The coordinators and the participants in the group are working in constellations and minor networks with different initiatives and projects, within the theme of the working group. Successful cooperation has been established between several ENHR participants and their students for example between universities in Australia, Japan and the Netherlands. Similar co-operations take place also among researchers in Sweden, and Spain and Sweden, Finland and Norway etc. These groups meet for common and comparative research projects, symposia and research exchange and are on-going. This has resulted in scientific articles and reports as well as the applications for scientific grants. In addition participants in the network can make use of the expertise of their fellow participants.