Sun Citizens:The Culture and Politics of Retirement in Modern America.

[摘要] Retirement played an increasingly larger role in American life by the mid-twentieth century, fueled by underlying social, cultural, and political trends.In the 1950s and 1960s, experts and observers in different sectors and various professional fields addressed what they viewed as certain financial, physical, social, and psychological tensions growing out of retirement and, in particular, existing retirement housing.A division of the Del E. Webb Corporation developed an innovative retirement community for aging Americans offering fun in the sun with fellow retirees, part of a broader trend of creating new residential environments for aging Americans—including growing attention to and activity involving retirement within the homebuilding industry.The history of Webb’s Sun City, Arizona, provides a window into the history of both retirement and retirement communities in modern America, also providing an opportunity for drawing on insights, analytical frameworks, and methods of scholarship in urban, political, and cultural history.In helping to shape an emergent culture and politics of old age in relation to housing, Sun City promoted new ideas about and practices involving retirement and retirement citizenship that revolved around what ostensibly were the particularities inherent in aging.Putting retired residents in conflict with Webb, each other, neighboring communities, and the metropolitan area more generally, the political culture that ultimately took root and flourished in the retirement community advanced an agenda operating on notions of the particular ;;needs” of retired Americans that, real or imagined, justified political outcomes and policies based on a discursive distinctiveness of retirement.In defending the landscape Webb developed, Sun City retirees in the 1960s and 1970s opposed paying local school taxes, eventually securing a political status exempting them from doing so.Residents subsequently sought to protect the age-segregated nature of the Sun City housing market, securing retirement-friendly zoning from Maricopa County in the 1980s.While the social community and built environment of Sun City addressed old age, they operated within suburban frameworks.And while ;;Sun Citizens” were older Americans, they also were homeowners and taxpayers, their class interests proving just as important as those tied to aging.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] History (General)

[关键词] Retirement;History (General);Humanities;History