Virtual, Augmented or Real? Ageing Research in an Era of Spatial Technologies

Population ageing has become the demographic phenomenon of the twenty-first century. Developed and developing countries are experiencing significant growth in the total number and proportion of their populations who now qualify as ‘aged’. The rise and rise of ageing as the new ‘crisis’ in population theory and policy should not be a surprise since it is the inevitable result of more than a century of active policy interventions on the object we know as ‘population’. Consequently we are experiencing a lag between the phenomenon of ageing and our conceptual and analytical understanding of ageing across multiple knowledge domains. The science of ageing remains highly developmental ranging from key concepts (what are age and ageing?) through to the aetiology of the dementias and their impacts on aged care resourcing. Our societies are struggling to catch up with the consequences of two centuries of efforts to manage population. While spatial studies of ageing have been researched for several decades, these have largely remained particular to geography and to some interdisciplinary crossovers such as geographical gerontology. In the meantime, spatial technologies have developed at a staggering pace. Goodchild coined the term ‘giscience’ in 1992 to flag the fact that many disparate spatial endeavours now constituted a shared scientific domain of activities, practices and theories. We now take for granted the capacity to spatially enable quantitative and qualitative data and to visually map, describe and inquire on outputs. We address the implications of the digital paradigm by investigating how ageing research will be altered through four key constructs of the digital era: simulation; visualisation; spatialisation and; representation. We illustrate these emerging issues using work we have conducted on population ageing phenomena in Australia and internationally which utilise spatial technology to engage with ageing in augmented, virtual and ‘real’ research encounters.