Moving to a “flat with referee” in older age: an embodied and social transition

Moving in older age is a critical experience in the person's life trajectory as it may require an important reorganization of their relation to the social and material environment. In order to better understand this experience, we propose to address it drawing on the concepts of rupture and transition as developed in the frame of sociocultural lifecourse psychology. We complete this theoretical framework with the distinction between frame and space and with literature on bodies and embodiment. We present a case study conducted in a building of so-called flats with referee, a type of flats developed in the frame of a political reform addressing demographic ageing, in a Swiss canton. We focus in particular on interviews with inhabitants before and after they moved to these flats. In the analysis, we discuss two aspects of this rupture/transition which, we argue, play an important role in the persons' experiences: firstly, the embodied dimension of the experience of rupture, which is notably related to the experience of a new physical environment; secondly, the social relations in these buildings designed especially to favor relationships among neighbors. Through this analysis, we aim at contributing to the understanding of development in older age from a sociocultural psychological perspective and to the literature on ruptures and transitions as we highlight theoretical and methodological implications.