Angelika Gabauer

Angelika Gabauer is a doctoral candidate at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space, TU Wien. She holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Vienna and studied Spatial Planning at TU Wien. She was a research fellow in the international research project Geographiesof Age (2018–2020), a cooperation between partners of ETH Zurich, KTH Stockholm and TU Wien. In 2021 she was a guest researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany. She is co-editor of Care and the City: Encounters with Urban Studies (Routledge 2022, Open Access 2021). Her doctoral thesis Ageing, Space and Subjectivity: A Study of Ageing in Vienna explores the interplay of ageing, subjectivation and urban space production, and asks for the role of space for the constitution of ageing subjects.

Doctoral Thesis

Ageing, Space and Subjectivity: A Study of Ageing in Vienna (working title)

The topic of age has received growing attention in recent decades; both in terms of the absolute number of old and very old people and their relative population share, and in terms of its discursive dominance in media debates, politics and academia. In context of growing life expectancy of urban populations and rising number of people in need of care accompanied with societal trends of singularization and reorganization of family structures, city authorities, governments and professionals in planning, architecture and urban design are increasingly confronted with questions of how to create and provide urban environments that meet these demographical changes. This doctoral project seeks to contribute to the conceptual debates around ‘ageing societies’ with a specific focus on ‘the ageing subject’ in context of urban space production. It explores the interplay of ageing, space and subjectivity with the aim of unravelling the role and meaning of spatial arrangements for ageing, and how in their design and planning certain ideas and perceptions of ageing are inscribed, (re)produced and possibly contested. In this vein, the project conceptually links discourses of ageing research with theories of (urban) space and subject formation. With an empirical focus on Vienna, it uses a qualitative study to pursue the research-guiding question of what role urban spaces play and what effects they have in the formation of ageing subjects.