Co-Creating Spatial Justice in Naturally Occurring Retirement Communities (NORCs) for Older Marginalised Groups in Manchester, UK

This paper explores the potential that Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC) programmes can have on generating spatial justice for older people experiencing different forms of exclusion. To date, older people have been a marginal figure in debates around spatial justice, a position that fails to recognise the inequalities within later life and the marginalisation that many older people in deprived urban communities face, particularly those in high-rise accommodation. For older people, challenges derived from increasing pressures within cities demonstrates the need for age-friendly interventions that are radical and creative in order to create inclusive communities, grounded in equity and democracy (Buffel et al., 2024). NORCs have emerged, primarily in North America, as an alternative model to specialist housing for older people living in cities, providing integrated services of support clustered around the existing housing accommodation in which older people have always lived, facilitating ageing in place. Yet there are gaps in knowledge relating to how NORCs are developed in diverse, international contexts, particularly when addressing marginalised communities. The paper focuses on the establishment of a NORC within an existing high-rise social housing tower block in inner-city Manchester (UK), within a neighbourhood that is experiencing different forms of deprivation and one that is engulfed by gentrification, studentification and austerity. The NORC here is a ‘solution’ borne out of older tenants’ long struggle of campaigning against inequalities faced in the block. This paper reflects on the co-production journey that social housing tenants have had, shedding light on the challenges and opportunities of co-developing NORC within a precarious context. Despite many challenges, we argue NORCs grounded in an activist ethic can address precarity by developing trust amongst some of the most excluded older communities in urban areas through collaborative structures that amplify older people’s voices to facilitate a resistance against gentrification pressures.