“Bring back the culture!”: An exploration of the relationship between cultural heritage, nostalgia and older adult subjective wellbeing in Singapore’s Chinatown

• Chinatown is a novel context where cultural heritage and older adults intersect. • Tangible and intangible cultural heritage felt to have progressively become worse. • The past was considered mostly gone, but some elements were felt to be restorable. • Changes were felt to have a negative effect on older adult’s subjective wellbeing. • Solutions are symbiotic and could benefit both older adults and cultural heritage. Continued population ageing in Singapore means there is a growing proportion of older adults, who are remaining in the community for longer, in line with the ageing in place policy encouraged in almost all ageing populations. This article focuses on Singapore’s Chinatown as a unique place where cultural heritage and older adults intersect and where both are experience and perceiving change in different ways, which contributes toward older adults’ subjective wellbeing. Utilising focus group discussions with community members of Chinatown, this article aims to: 1. To discover how the relationship between nostalgia and cultural heritage plays a role in the subjective wellbeing of older adults in Singapore’s Chinatown; and based on the relationship discovered: 2. To explore what solutions there are to some of the concerns raised by participants in terms of the cultural heritage and older adults of Singapore’s Chinatown. Our reflexive thematic analysis emphasises that participants felt that cultural heritage, has changed for the worse for older adults and this means older adults feel nostalgic for a past Chinatown. While most participants feel that the past Chinatown is gone, they feel some elements can be re/enacted or brought back. Ultimately, participants identified solutions which aimed to improve both the subjective wellbeing of older adults and help pass on and restore the cultural heritage of Singapore’s Chinatown. The findings have significant implications for the role of older adults in the community, in terms of ageing in place and as guardians of, but also part of cultural heritage themselves.