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Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a case study of a senior centre in Bratislava and its closure that triggered an unprecedented reaction by the clients and the community concerned. The bottom-up perspective is used to understand the impact of the wider public setting and public policies on the regimes of care.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents a case study of a senior centre/day-care centre in Bratislava as a subject of political debate on the communal level in the City Administrative District of Bratislava-Stare Mesto/Old Town. The decision to replace the senior centre with a créche pitted two age groups against each other, which made the public discussion about the persistence of the senior centre or its abolition extremely complicated.

However, the decision triggered a reaction that was unprecedented for Slovakia initiated by the centre´s senior clients themselves and the community concerned – challenging the idea of seniors being passive and not interested in the res publica in the sense of ageivism as suggested by Israel Doron (2018).

The data were collected via ethnographic research: participant observation and in-depth interviews with the centre's clients, their relatives, personnel and a broader community of neighbours (2017 – 2021). They focus on how a place-based community united around the day-care centre responded to its abolition: Creating a civic association that addressed intergenerational communication and the importance of supporting the debate about it in the broader society. Nowadays, the community continues on a symbolic level (Cohen 1985).

The bottom-up perspective is used to understand the impact of the wider public setting and public policies on the regimes of care on the senior citizens in the era of its intense transformation (Dahl 2017), when the roles of the family, the state and the communities are negotiated.