Everyday discrimination in the neighbourhood: what a ‘doing’ perspective on age and ethnicity can offer

Despite the fact that urbanisation, population ageing and international migration constitute major societal developments of our time, little attention has been paid to studying them together in a comprehensive manner. In this paper, we argue that, when treating age and ethnicity as practical processes for addressing and identifying with social groups, it is necessary to do so from a ‘doing’ perspective. The question we ask focuses on which social memberships are made relevant or irrelevant in residential environments and how that relevance or irrelevance is established. Drawing upon a quantitative study among individuals of Turkish migrant origin living in Vienna, Austria, we find that it is rather common for the respondents to have been assigned to multiple intersecting social groups and that they were treated unfairly in their own neighbourhoods. However, such ascriptions do not necessarily correspond to objective categorisations of research or subjective identifications. Hence, the discrimination that is present in a neighbourhood does not necessarily lead to decreased place attachment or a diminishing sense of home. In fact, we find that the ‘satisfaction paradox’ is quite common in environmental gerontology and that it may actually intersect with the ‘immigration paradox’. Applying processual intersectionality is not only fruitful for research, it can also improve the conceptualisation of age-friendly cities.