Paper short abstract:

Elderly people often live at social margins. This paper uses elderhood in the city of Zanzibar, Tanzania as a lens to analyze urban life and shows how some elderly people are able to respond to marginality caused by health problems, frailty and poverty with transnational and cosmopolitan capacities.

Paper long abstract:

Elderly people are typically not the first social group that comes to our mind if we think of cities and their inhabitants. The widespread oblivion of elderly people in urban research and policy is surprising since they constitute a growing section of the urban population and can be encountered in a variety of spaces and neighborhoods across cities. This paper argues that urban elderhood is a fruitful, unusual lens to study urban life, especially when interested in how cities are experience, lived and worked on by urban dwellers at the social margins. It draws on ethnographic research in the city of Zanzibar (Tanzania), an East African island in the Indian Ocean. Many elderly urbaners experience frailty, serious health problems or even disablement and cannot work anymore or make a living. They shift towards social margins and become dependent on their social environment in a context in which state institutions are weak and thus pension schemes and health insurances are not widespread. Urban elders need to find alternative practices of coping with aging and care receiving. Some are able to maintain social networks stretching across neighborhoods, urban-rural areas and even across continents and can for example access cosmopolitan knowledge, goods or even arrange medical treatments to cope with critical moments in their aging process. Nevertheless, also localized spaces like neighborhoods do besides their direct impact on the accessibility of state services (hospitals, public transport etc) and other urban amenities (jobs, shops etc.) play a key role in shaping transnational and cosmopolitan agentic capacities.