Aging and Space. An Emerging Catalog of Spaces in Tension

The article explores how aging begins to transform the spatial structure, the modes of functioning, and the image of the city and questions what remains after thirty years of the migratory phenomenon of the elderly population on the Costa del Sol, in Spain. The Andalusian coast has been affected by migration for a long time. It has also been able to modify itself accordingly, composing the flows of the elderly with those of other people and communities, exhibiting the terms of a new situation always in tension between different forces. In this unique situation in tensions, what remains is a territory that no longer responds to the only restrictive dimension of Europe’s retirement resort. Today Costa del Sol consists of components that react differently to the presence of the elderly through a succession of fragments approached in a paratactic way. Among which the elderly figures only as one subjects of construction and use of the territory. Both when it is the protagonist and when, on the contrary, it is excluded. Finally, the fragmentation of the territory inserts the challenge of having to rethink policies, projects, and actions that must be reconciled with a new fragmented life of the elderly.