Place & Community

This theme positions place and place-based communities as critical mediators of life experiences. A number of projects and programmes within ILAS are orientated around ideas of how places and communities represent powerful factors that intensify advantages, and/or disadvantages in the lives of individuals and groups. In some instances, they may serve as crucial enablers of participation. Work in this area considers multiple dimensions of place, including: physical aspects and embedded infrastructure; social and cultural characteristics; and people’s subjective relationship and links with place. A core part of this themes involves working collaboratively with community stakeholders to identify and promote new ways for different population groups to participate and make place in their localities.

Important work streams in the theme of place and community:

• Independent living and Community-Based Care: Work on how individuals with different needs, backgrounds and capacities can be supported to live independently and control decisions on where they want to live and with whom. Examples of work on this theme include: CDLP report for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on the use of EU structural funds to support independent living
• Civic Engagement and Volunteering: Activities that involve looking at the impact of different forms of civic engagement on people’s lives and developing programmes and collaborations that strengthen ILAS-community relationships. Examples of work on this theme include: the Campus Engage national civic engagement movement for third-level institutions developed by CKI
• Participation and Spatial Justice: Programmes that evaluate and advance new integrative models of participation and care delivery in community based settings. Examples of work on this theme include: Project Lifecourse 3-Cities Project on enhancing participation for children and youth, older people and people with disabilities in urban neighbourhoods, CESRD work on evaluating the GENIO community based model for dementia care.
• Belonging, Identity and Exclusion: Work that unpacks how a sense of belonging and individual and collective notions of identity are grounded in place, and how this can shape the impact of adverse experiences. Examples of work on this theme include: ICSG work on rural places as mediators of social exclusion for older people and on re-making meanings of home after personal and environmental change.