Old age in unforgiving streets: mobility and existence in Latin America

Abstract

This article proposes a critical and philosophical reflection on aging in Latin American cities, focusing on the relationships between mobility, visibility, and urban existence. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's political philosophy, we understand mobility not simply as movement, but as a political condition of appearing in public space. Based on insights from Virilio and Harvey, we argue that in Global South metropolises, aging bodies become invisible. We propose an urbanism of presence and a poetics of aging as an ethical foundation for fairer cities.

Keywords:
aging; urban mobility; Hannah Arendt; Latin America; critical urbanism

Resumo

Este artigo propõe uma reflexão crítico-filosófica sobre o envelhecimento nas cidades latino-americanas, com foco nas relações entre mobilidade, visibilidade e existência urbana. A partir da filosofia de Hannah Arendt, abordamos a mobilidade não como mera locomoção, mas como condição política de aparecer no espaço público. Com contribuições de Virilio e Harvey, argumentamos que, nas metrópoles do Sul Global, os corpos envelhecidos se tornam invisíveis. Propomos um urbanismo da presença e uma poética do envelhecer como base ética para cidades mais justas.

Palavras-chave:
envelhecimento; mobilidade urbana; Hannah Arendt; América Latina; urbanismo crítico

Introduction

“Being seen and heard by others becomes the tangible manifestation of human reality.” With this statement, Arendt (2007) offers one of the most profound definitions of what it means to exist politically. The city, in this sense, is not merely a set of buildings or flows – it is the space where we become visible, where life gains density through action and speech. When someone is prevented from appearing, from circulating, from being heard, that subject is displaced from the common world. Exclusion thus ceases to be merely material: it becomes ontological.

In recent decades, Latin America has witnessed an accelerated process of population aging. According to data from Cepal (2023), it is estimated that by 2050 the population aged 60 and over will double in several countries in the region. However, this demographic transformation has occurred amid cities marked by historical inequalities, fragmented planning, and urban policies that disregard the multiple temporalities of life. Aging in Bogotá, Salvador, Quito, or Buenos Aires often means being pushed backstage from urban experience.

Streets are narrow and uneven; public transportation is inaccessible; squares are redesigned according to market aesthetics that exclude permanence and slowness. The city – this space that should guarantee the “right to appear” – becomes hostile to those who move cautiously, who carry in their bodies the marks of time. In this scenario, older adults do not merely face practical difficulties: they face a crisis of political visibility, as their presence is increasingly unanticipated, underrepresented, and unheard in contemporary urban projects.

This article starts from the premise that the exclusion of old age from urban centers is not an accident, but a symptom of a city model that privileges speed, productivity, and youth. To confront this condition, we propose an epistemological shift: rather than treating mobility and accessibility as merely technical categories, we approach them as existential and political dimensions. The city is not only traversed – it is inhabited, narrated, remembered. It is precisely this symbolic dimension of urban presence that we seek to recover through a poetic-philosophical reading of aging, in constant dialogue with urban issues, aiming at a critical-reflexive interdisciplinarity.

The choice of Hannah Arendt as a central reference is justified not only by her emphasis on public space and plurality, but also by her profound understanding of human action as that which inaugurates the new. By incorporating her philosophy into the Latin American urban debate, we aim to shed light on the need to rethink the city as a space capable of accommodating distinct rhythms and temporalities of life.

The objective of this article is therefore to investigate how urban mobility – understood as the possibility of appearing in common space – is denied to older adults in Global South cities, and what this denial reveals about the political project of these cities. Through this dialogue between philosophy and urbanism, we also propose pathways toward an urbanism of presence: a way of planning and living the city that recognizes old age not as a problem, but as a potential.

Our trajectory thus follows these steps: after this introduction, we explore the theoretical framework, with emphasis on Arendt’s political philosophy, the contemporary conceptions of Paul Virilio and David Harvey, and studies on mobility, memory, and urban space. We then briefly reflect on how a Latin American city incorporates these elements (the selected corpus is the city of São Paulo), and conclude with the proposal of a poetics of aging.

Between demographic growth and urban invisibility

Latin American cities are aging, but they are not preparing for old age. In Brazil, the population is becoming older and more feminized, according to the 2022 Census. The country presents a higher percentage of older adults (15.8%) than the Latin American average (13.4%). However, demographic data such as these are inscribed in urban landscapes still marked by inequality, the precarization of public space, and informality. In this context, old age is not merely a stage of life, but a condition that intensifies exclusion.

The region’s metropolises, such as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Bogotá, reveal a profound disconnect between urban planning and the realities of aging. Recent data and studies corroborate this fact, as will be shown below.

A study involving 32 older adults living in São Paulo (Dione dos Santos et al., 2017) found that 59% faced difficulties accessing public transportation, presented an increased risk of falls, and reported significant impacts on quality of life and social participation. Another study based on data from the Health, Well-Being and Aging cohort (Sabe, 2000–2015) showed that 37% of older adults reported difficulties accessing health services, with women, Black individuals, and those with low educational levels being the most affected (Oliveira et al., 2022). These data indicate not only physical limitations, but chronic urban barriers that restrict active aging and the public presence of older populations.

In a qualitative analysis involving 22 older adults from Mexico City (Villena-Sánchez and Boschmann, 2024), it was found that despite the extensive public transportation network in the central region, many experience negative conditions when using it: overcrowding, insecurity, inadequate comfort, and difficulties with boarding and alighting. A complementary survey involving 228 participants revealed that 46% experienced significant transportation difficulties, with complaints regarding the lack of ramps, inappropriate signage, and buses that move abruptly during boarding. Even in a city considered relatively well served, there are deep disparities between central zones – equipped with infrastructure – and peripheral areas, where access becomes restricted or risky.

Regarding the city of Buenos Aires, data from the local government acknowledge advances in the microcenter, with sidewalk leveling on more than 65 blocks and the creation of Metrobus stations and accessible squares. However, numerous streets still lack adequate ramps, accessible bathrooms remain limited, and motorcycle parking blocks pedestrian passage (Tomino, 2015). Reports from users with reduced mobility (Park, 2018) reveal that broken ramps and stairways without alternatives force dangerous crossings on urban highways. These conditions demonstrate a fragmented vision of planning: there are punctual investments, but no inclusive and comprehensive urban policy.

Comparative studies in Latin American cities are not uncommon in pointing out that peripheral areas have precarious infrastructure and reduced access to formal transportation systems (Center for Strategic Studies and Debates of the Legislative Chamber, 2015). Spatial inequality translates into difficulties for older adults in accessing crucial urban services. This pattern reflects a city in which more fragile bodies are relegated to the margins, both physically and symbolically.

The absence of integrated accessibility policies, public transportation insensitive to physical limitations, and the symbolic violence that distances older adults from social life are symptoms of a broader crisis: the depoliticization of old age. Older adults become subjects of tutelage rather than dialogue; objects of assistance rather than participation. To expand the discussion of our object and push it toward an ontological analysis, we will turn to Arendt’s reflections and her notions of plurality.

Hannah Arendt and the exclusion of plurality

For Arendt, the public space is more than a physical place where people meet – it is the condition for political existence properly speaking. In The Human Condition, she states that “to be alive in the human world means to be seen, heard, and named” (Arendt, 2007). The city, in this sense, can be understood as a vast architecture of visibility: a space where subjects not only move, but reveal themselves, narrate their stories, and construct collective meanings. When the urban environment functions as public space, it becomes an arena of plurality – a central concept in Arendt’s thought, since it is through the diversity of subjects, experiences, and appearances that the common world is constituted:

We are born into this world of plurality, in which fathers and mothers are prepared for us, prepared to receive us and welcome us, to guide us and demonstrate that we are not strangers. We grow up to be like everyone else, yet the more we grow, the more we become equal in the sense of absolute and unbearable uniqueness. Then we love, and the world between us – the world of plurality and of feeling at home – bursts into flames, until we ourselves are capable of receiving the newcomers, the newly arrived, to whom we now demonstrate what we no longer believe, namely, that they are not strangers. We die in absolute singularity, definitively strangers, who take leave after a brief stay in a strange place. What remains is the world of plurality. (Arendt, 2007, p. 456)

Plurality is one of the central pillars of Hannah Arendt’s political thought. More than a sociological characteristic of human diversity, plurality is, for Arendt (2007, p. 7), an ontological condition of human existence: “men, not man, live on the Earth and inhabit the world.” This statement affirms not only difference, but the idea that the world can only be truly common if it accommodates the simultaneous presence of distinct subjects, who think, act, and speak from unique positions.

For Arendt, plurality is what gives politics its most authentic meaning. Political action is not the mere administration of interests or resolution of conflicts, but the capacity to inaugurate something new among human beings – and such inauguration is only possible because we are distinct. Plurality is therefore the basis of freedom and action: if we were all identical, nothing new could emerge; if we were absolutely isolated, there would be no one with whom to dialogue.

This plural condition manifests paradigmatically in the public space, which Arendt defines as the place where subjects appear to one another, act, speak, and are recognized. It is in the common space that plurality becomes political reality, because differences are neither erased nor privatized, but exposed and heard. The city, in this sense, is a privileged stage of plurality – provided it is not converted into a territory of homogenization or segregation:

Even the experience of the world, which is given to us materially and sensorially, depends on our contact with other human beings, on our common sense that regulates and controls all other senses, without which each of us would remain enclosed within our own particularity of sensory data, which in themselves are treacherous and unreliable. (Arendt, 2012, p. 635)

Plurality, however, is not only factual – it is also vulnerable. Totalitarianism, in its various forms, arises precisely from attempts to annihilate plurality, whether by imposing a single narrative, persecuting difference, or destroying public space. A city that marginalizes certain bodies, silences certain voices, or excludes certain experiences is, in this sense, practicing violence against plurality and therefore against the very possibility of politics:

The basic error of all materialism in politics – this materialism being neither of Marxist origin nor even modern, but as old as our history of political theory – is to ignore the inevitability with which men disclose themselves as distinct and singular persons, even when they are wholly absorbed in the pursuit of an entirely material and worldly objective. To dispense with this disclosure – if it were indeed possible – would mean to transform men into something they are not; on the other hand, to deny that it is real and has consequences of its own would be simply unrealistic. (Arendt, 2020, p. 27)

The scope of Arendt’s thought is deeply connected to totalitarianism, particularly the year 1933, when she was forced to leave Germany and became stateless. For Arendt, this movement of totalitarian domination is precisely what leads to the ruin of public space.

The end of public space as a consequence of totalitarianism also signifies the end of the “in-between” space, erecting a kind of barrier “that presses men together so tightly that it is as though their plurality dissolved into One Man of gigantic proportions” (Arendt, 2012, p. 619). A new universalized rule is imposed, and the end of singularity is announced in a context in which the state “dominates all spheres of human life, interferes in the activities of individuals, whether public or private, leaving no room for any distinctly human manifestation” (Schio, 2012, p. 47).

In contemporary contexts – especially in Global South cities – plurality continues to be threatened by processes of gentrification, social cleansing, structural racism, and invisible aging. The exclusion of older adults from urban space – whether through physical inaccessibility or symbolic indifference – is not merely a matter of social rights, but a denial of plurality as a political value. Each excluded older person represents a story untold, a memory that does not circulate, a perspective that is lost. The shattered world in dark times “[...] could not exist without destroying the sphere of public life, that is, without destroying, through the isolation of men, their political capacities” (Arendt, 2012, p. 634).

Developing urban policies inspired by Arendt thus means creating conditions for all subjects – not only the productive or the young – to appear in common space with dignity. Plurality requires not merely coexistence, but recognition. And this recognition passes through spatial planning, institutional listening, and the construction of cities where difference is not an obstacle, but a possibility of world-making.

However, in contemporary Latin American cities, marked by structural inequality and fragmented urbanization, the Arendtian promise of public space encounters a historical limit. The exclusion of older populations – especially those who are poorer, racialized, or peripheral – reveals that visibility is not a universal right, but a spatially distributed privilege. The renovated square without benches, the transportation system that disregards fragile bodies, the traffic lights that measure the time of haste – all of these denounce a city in which public appearance is selective, and in which old age is frequently erased from the collective narrative.

This reflection allows for an approximation to Kohn’s (2004) critique, according to which public space is a continuous political construction, subject to forces of privatization, normalization, and silencing. In Global South urban contexts, where capital and control shape the landscape, public space tends to become a space of symbolic exclusion, in which only certain bodies are perceived as legitimate, efficient, or “presentable”.

Arendt (2007) further distinguishes three dimensions of the active life: labor, work, and action. While labor is associated with survival and work with the production of durable objects, action is the mode of being fully human – because through it the subject appears before others, inaugurates the new, and founds politics. Thus, denying older adults the opportunity to act – to be heard, to interfere in the world – is to deny their humanity in the Arendtian sense. Old age, therefore, does not represent the end of active life, but the possibility of reinscribing it in another form, provided the space allows such reinscription.

This argument gains strength when read alongside Arendt’s idea of narrative. In Between Past and Future, she argues that human life requires a story in order to be understood (Arendt, 2001). Without telling and being told, the subject dissolves into anonymity. In the urban context, the presence of old age is a narrative presence: it carries the memory of the neighborhood, the bench in the square, the market that no longer exists. Its exclusion is also the exclusion of spatial memory – and therefore the depoliticization of the city.

Moreover, public appearance implies reciprocity. It is not enough to be present – this presence must be recognized. Butler (2018), in discussing the vulnerability of bodies in public space, revisits Arendt by affirming that we are bodies whose politics is played out in the capacity to appear. And who defines who appears? In cities where urban design privileges fast movement, consumption, and surveillance, slow, fragile, or silent bodies are the first to disappear – even when they are physically there:

Isolation and loneliness are not the same. I can be isolated – that is, in a situation in which I cannot act because there is no one to act with – without being lonely; and I can be lonely – that is, in a situation in which, as a person, I feel completely abandoned by all human companionship – without being isolated. Isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their lives, where they act together in the pursuit of a common interest, is destroyed. (Arendt, 2012, p. 633)

Therefore, it is possible to affirm that the absence of accessible infrastructure, institutional listening, and effective participation of older adults in urban planning constitutes not merely a logistical failure, but a denial of public space as the foundation of politics. The city, far from being neutral, acts as a filter determining who may or may not exercise their political condition.

Reclaiming Arendt in the Latin American context implies restoring the city as a space of concrete plurality. It means affirming that every urban policy must ask: who has the right to appear here? Who is allowed to narrate their life among others? And who is being excluded from the common world without our noticing?

In this sense, an Arendtian urbanism is not merely an engineering of infrastructure, but an engineering of presence – one that designs spaces where all can be seen, heard, and, above all, exist. We now place this discussion in dialogue with contemporary reflections on an urbanism of presence.

Mobility, time, and existence

In contemporary societies, mobility is often treated as a technical issue: displacement between points, logistical efficiency, and physical infrastructure. However, from a philosophical and political perspective – as proposed by Arendt (2007), Tuan (1977), and Casey (2000) – mobility is far more than circulation: it is the possibility of inhabiting the world with meaning. In other words, moving through the city is not merely going from one place to another; it is appearing in common space, inscribing oneself in collective life, keeping one’s existence active.

In the context of urban aging in Latin American cities, mobility becomes an ontological dimension. As Casey (1997) argues, memory is deeply linked to place and movement. Older adults do not merely carry memories – they walk through them. Each street, square, or public bench becomes a point of narrative anchoring. To prevent or hinder this movement is to deny the subject the right to be whole in their own history.

This issue becomes even more acute when read through Arendt (2007). For her, as discussed above, the common world is formed where humans appear to one another in freedom and plurality. When the aging body can no longer move – whether due to impassable stairways, buses without ramps, or broken sidewalks – it loses not only displacement, but the opportunity to continue appearing. The city thus becomes a device of progressive silencing.

Paul Virilio, the French philosopher and urban theorist, devoted much of his work to analyzing the political, social, and existential implications of speed on contemporary life. Creator of what he called dromology – the study of speed as a structuring force of culture – Virilio argues that modern power is increasingly linked to the capacity for rapid movement, time compression, and the acceleration of experiences. In works such as Speed and Politics and The Critical Space, he proposes that speed ceases to be merely a characteristic of transportation systems and becomes a civilizational logic that profoundly reorganizes cities, bodies, and subjectivities (Virilio, 1995; 2001).

In the urban context, this logic manifests in the prioritization of continuous flows: automobiles, high-speed trains, mobility apps, “real time.” For Virilio, the contemporary city becomes less a space of coexistence and more a corridor of passage, where permanence is undesirable and slowness is treated as dysfunction. In this model, everything that cannot keep up with acceleration – such as the aging body, the hesitant step, prolonged contemplation – becomes an urban obstacle:

What is decisive in modern history is no longer war, nor economy, nor even politics, but speed. Politics now becomes a matter of controlling speed, rhythm, and the acceleration of events. Speed is not simply a physical measure of movement, but a determining factor in power relations. (Virilio, 1997, p. 17)

Virilio (2018), in an interview with António Covas, states:

We live in the era of chronopolitics, in the full cult of light-speed, in a true race against time. The speed of transactions exceeds the time of politics, turning the nation-state into an increasingly decorative figure. The speed of transactions allows and guarantees the hegemony of speculation over the real needs of the economy. Speed is a kind of intoxication that leaves behind the sensible world and sensibility.

Old age, therefore, is not excluded merely through neglect or prejudice: it is also a systemic incompatibility with the city of speed. The acceleration of urban time does not admit stumbling, pausing, or waiting as legitimate parts of urban experience. In this context, the older adult is a body that “slows things down,” that challenges the timetable of capital, that recalls finitude within a space designed for immediate consumption.

Virilio (1997b) helps us perceive that urban accessibility is not limited to infrastructure – it also involves an ethics of time. When a traffic light closes too quickly for an older person to cross, when public transport does not allow sufficient time for safe boarding, or when a bench is removed from a “revitalized” square, we are witnessing acts of temporal exclusion. There is no place for what does not accelerate. The exclusion of old age thus becomes a form of symbolic eugenics: it operates not through direct elimination, but through the emptying of presence.

Virilio’s critique thus provides an important lens for analyzing Latin American cities, where urban modernization often translates into uneven acceleration. While some zones are equipped with new high- -speed corridors, others barely have adequate sidewalks. And even in renovated centers, older adults – as shown in the ethnographic fragments discussed here – remain the first to disappear, not through absence, but through incompatibility with the expected rhythm.

Confronting this logic requires more than ramps and adapted traffic lights: it demands a profound rethinking of the city as a place where all temporalities can coexist. Against the urbanism of speed, we propose an urbanism of permanence – one in which slowness is not merely tolerated, but celebrated as a legitimate form of existing in public space. Such an urbanism of permanence would also question technique itself:

Technology colonizes the human body just as it has colonized the body of the Earth. Roads, railways, and airlines colonized the territorial body by organizing it. Today, what is threatened by the colonization of micromachines is the animal body. (Virilio, 1997a, p. 56)

Echoing Virilio, Harvey (1973; 2014), one of the most influential voices in Marxist critiques of contemporary urbanism, also offers a sharp and critical perspective on the urban condition. In works such as Social Justice and the City, Spaces of Hope, and Rebel Cities, Harvey argues that the city should not be seen merely as a backdrop for social life, but as a social and political product deeply marked by relations of class, capital, and power. What is at stake in cities is not only territory, but the way life itself is organized, valued, and distributed.

The concept of spatial justice, central to Harvey’s work (2014), starts from the idea that the geographical distribution of opportunities and resources largely determines subjects’ life possibilities. Inequality thus manifests not only in income or property, but in how public space is accessed – or denied – to different groups. From this perspective, the capitalist city is not neutral: it is planned to favor capital flows and elite mobility, while pushing vulnerable populations to the physical and symbolic margins of urban space.

Incorporating this perspective into the analysis of aging in Latin American cities reveals a still under-discussed phenomenon: the spatial marginalization of the experience of aging. Older adults are rarely included in decision-making processes regarding mobility, infrastructure, and public space. Their needs are treated as exceptions; their routines as delays; their bodies as “costs” to a model of the agile, young, and competitive city. The result is structural exclusion: nonexistent ramps, hostile sidewalks, inadequate transportation, insecurity, and invisibility.

Harvey (2014) helps us see that this is not a planning failure, but a consequence of an urban project informed by neoliberalism, in which space becomes a commodity and everything that does not generate profit is relegated to invisibility. In this logic, the aging body – which does not produce, walks slowly, and requires care – is economically uninteresting and therefore urbanistically excluded. As Harvey argued at the World Social Forum in 2009:

I understand the Right to the City as the right of all of us to create cities that satisfy human needs – our needs. The Right to the City is not the right to have – using an English expression – “the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich.” We all must have the same rights to build the different kinds of cities we want to exist. The Right to the City is not simply a right to what already exists in the city, but a right to transform the city into something radically different. […] Thus, in this struggle for the Right to the City, there will also be a struggle against capital. (Harvey, 2014)

By reclaiming the right to the city, Harvey proposes a radical inversion of this logic. The right to the city is not merely the right to access urban services, but the right to participate in defining how the city should be lived. It is a collective, insurgent, and transformative right – one that demands reimagining urban space as a common good rather than a market product. In this sense, guaranteeing the right to the city for older adults means recognizing their narrative authority and their capacity to contribute alternative visions of time, space, and life.

This right also implies recognizing that aging is not a condition of others, but of everyone. How a city treats its older adults today mirrors the city we are building for the future. A city that silences old age also silences listening, memory, and the possibility of learning from time.

Integrating Harvey with Arendt allows us to combine a structural critique of urban exclusion with an ontological defense of plurality and political action. Arendt teaches us that the world exists only where there is presence and listening; Harvey shows us how this world is systematically expropriated from those who do not conform to the rhythm of capital.

The challenge, therefore, is twofold: to decommodify space and to repoliticize presence. Or, in more concrete terms, to build cities that not only include aging bodies, but recognize them as fundamental to the construction of a more just, more plural, and more habitable world.

At this point, it is also worth invoking Tuan (1977), who distinguishes between “space” and “place.” Space is abstract extension; place is lived space, marked by experience and affective bonds. The older adult who walks to the square where they have always sat, or to the market where they have spoken with the same faces for decades, is doing far more than moving – they are updating a place of belonging. To deprive them of this possibility, through lack of infrastructure or symbolic violence, is to deprive them of the world.

Therefore, mobility and accessibility must be thought of as political conditions of existence. Ramps, traffic-light timing, handrails, benches, shade – these are not mere amenities. They are devices of visibility, permanence, and listening. They are ways of ensuring that the city remains a space for all times and all bodies.

This perspective allows us to propose what we call an urbanism of presence: a way of planning and living the city that privileges not speed, but human density; that respects the diversity of life rhythms; and that allows old age to continue existing publicly, not as an exception, but as a constitutive part of the urban fabric.

São Paulo: movement and old age

Between express corridors, hurried bike lanes, and overcrowded platforms, São Paulo presents itself as a paradigm of the Latin American metropolis caught between modernization and inequality. Its vast territorial scale and social complexity make it a fertile ground for observing the subtle – and not so subtle – forms of exclusion that weigh upon the aging body. What is at stake is not only infrastructure, but the very conception of the city it translates: who has the right to occupy, circulate, and remain in urban space?

We selected the city of São Paulo for a brief analysis due to its relevance and paradigmatic complexity for urban studies, as well as its capacity to enable a more pragmatic examination of our object. A study conducted in 2017 with 32 older adults living in the city, with an average age of 75.5 years, revealed that difficulties in accessing public transportation, recurrent falls, and architectural barriers directly compromise quality of life and social participation (Rodrigues et al., 2017). Beyond numbers, these accounts signal that the aging body is continually disauthorized from existing autonomously in the city. This is compounded by data from the Sabe study (2000–2015), which indicate an increase in functional limitations with age, aggravated by pain, insecurity, and lack of income (Coelho et al., 2022).

This scenario directly echoes Paul Virilio’s critique. In his analysis of dromology – the logic of speed that structures modernity – Virilio (1995) warns us: the contemporary city is not designed to welcome, but to flow. Public space becomes a field of constant acceleration, where the slow body turns into an obstacle. In São Paulo, this manifests in traffic lights that close too quickly for those who walk cautiously; buses that depart before passengers can stabilize themselves; broken sidewalks where slowness can be fatal. The city, from this perspective, does not wait – and those who cannot keep up disappear.

Harvey (2014), in turn, provides the structural framework of this exclusion. In his conception of spatial justice, the right to the city is directly linked to the possibility of shaping – with presence and voice – the processes that configure urban life. Yet in São Paulo, the logic of urban renewal prioritizes road corridors, investments in central areas, and the privatization of public space, without listening to bodies that inhabit time at other rhythms. In this context, the older adult becomes a spatially disauthorized subject, whose presence appears not to justify investment – after all, they “do not produce,” “do not consume enough,” and “walk slowly.”

The intersection of these critiques is further intensified through Arendt’s (2007) perspective, for whom political action requires the condition of “appearing before others.” To deny urban space to old age is also to deny the possibility of continued action, narration, and participation. It is to deny plurality – and thus to deny the common world.

Virilio (1995) states that power is always the power to move faster. From antiquity to the present, victorious empires and armies have been those that move more quickly. This dromological logic applies not only to warfare, but also to politics, economy, and culture. Within this logic, the older adult becomes a body that “no longer exists,” a trace of something that no longer produces within technicist dynamics – an inconvenience. In the city that never sleeps, aging becomes an impediment.

Speed becomes a strategic factor even in the production of knowledge. Virilio (1997b) sees in modern technologies – trains, automobiles, the internet, satellites – a continuous process of acceleration that transforms our perception of time and space. He calls this an imbalance between speed and perception: the world moves faster than we can process, and thus what does not align with this logic becomes obsolete more rapidly. The sensation of anachronism itself accelerates, and the incessant pursuit of the new intensifies.

For Virilio (2001), every new technical invention carries its own accident: inventing the train also invents derailment; inventing the airplane also invents the crash; inventing the internet also invents informational collapse (or cyberterrorism). This philosophical thesis – known as the “integral accident” – is directly linked to speed: the faster the system, the more catastrophic its potential failure.

Virilio (2001) invites philosophy to reflect on the ethics of speed. It is not enough to think about what we do with technology; we must also reflect on the rhythm at which we live. Philosophy, in this sense, becomes a gesture of resistance against technical time, indiscriminate acceleration, and in favor of a human, lived, and shared temporality.

In São Paulo, as in other major Latin American cities, only an ethical urbanism – an urbanism of listening – one that values silence, deceleration, and memory in certain layers, could inspire truly effective public policies addressing aging in the urban context.

In the case of São Paulo, thinking effective public policies requires recognizing that technical solutions are not neutral: every ramp, every bench, every traffic-light interval is an ethical and political decision about who should or should not inhabit public space. Creating a city that is just for older adults is not an assistential concession, but a gesture of reconstructing the urban social pact. Integrating São Paulo into this reflection is not merely to denounce its structural exclusion – it is to recognize its potential for transformation. Because where there is a body, there is presence. And where there is presence, there is the possibility of beginning again.

Ethical dimensions of space and intergenerational responsibility

Thinking the city from the perspective of old age is, above all, an ethical gesture. It implies recognizing that urban space is not neutral, but a concrete expression of values, priorities, and silences. The way we plan streets, transportation systems, squares, and buildings reveals what we consider worthy of permanence, attention, and care. In this sense, the erasure of old age from Latin American urban space reveals not only an infrastructural crisis, but a moral one: we are building cities that reject time, memory, and slowness – and, in doing so, reject themselves.

Arendt (2007) reminds us that political action requires responsibility, because every act inaugurates a new world and carries consequences that exceed us. Jonas (2006), in proposing the “principle of responsibility,” argues that contemporary ethics must include concern for the long-term effects of our decisions, especially on future generations. This idea can be re-signified to include relationships with older generations as well. Caring for urban aging is caring for the future – not only because we will all age, but because a city that welcomes old age is a city that recognizes its own finitude and complexity.

Intergenerational urban ethics demands a politics of listening, in which urban planning is carried out in dialogue with those who have accumulated time in the city. This implies the systematic inclusion of councils of older adults in decisions regarding mobility, housing, and public spaces. It also requires recognizing that older adults are not a problem to be solved, but a presence capable of guiding more just, sustainable, and humane paths. By silencing these voices, we not only erase experiences, but also deny the symbolic continuity of the city.

The ethical dimension of urban space manifests, for example, in the decision to keep a bench in a square even if it does not fit the new landscape design; or to allow traffic lights to remain open long enough for everyone to cross with dignity. Small gestures like these ensure that the world remains common. They express what Arendt (2007) calls amor mundi: care for the world as a space shared among generations, differences, and rhythms.

Poetics of aging: old age as urban potential

In the slow corners of the city, where time seems to hesitate before moving on, the poetics of aging dwell. There, between the shade of an old tree and the worn bench of a forgotten square, old age inscribes another cartography – not of haste, but of permanence. If the modern city is built for speed, the aging body invites deviation, observation, and listening. In this invitation, it reveals a potential: to make the city a more inhabitable place for all.

Benjamin (1989), in describing the flâneur – the one who wanders the city attentive to its forgotten details – perhaps unknowingly described the experience of urban old age. The older adult who has walked the same route for decades carries a city no longer found on maps. Their memories are invisible layers of space, voices resisting the accelerated erasure of the landscape. As Bachelard (1993) reminds us, space is also made of dreams, memories, and intimacies. Old age thus becomes a way of sustaining space as a lived place, not merely a traversed one.

In Latin America, where many cities were built upon colonial wounds, inequalities, and silences, old age can also function as an act of counter-memory. The body that remains – even when excluded – declares: “the city is not only for those who run.” The grandmother telling stories on the porch, the grandfather silently watching the street, the older adults playing dominoes on the sidewalk – all of them are, in their own way, urban poets. They do not write with ink, but with presence. And presence, as Arendt (2007) would say, is the raw material of the common world. It is a narrative being constructed, memory becoming material.

To propose a poetics of aging is to propose that the city embraces the diversity of times. That it has places where stopping is not synonymous with obstruction, but with contemplation. That it recognizes in the repeated gesture of the older adult a form of care for space. That it accepts being slow, silent, and old as well. Because only a city that knows how to age can be truly new – capable of welcoming what is born without erasing what has remained.

Final considerations

Aging in Latin American cities often means confronting a succession of silences: the silence of a body that no longer fits urban architecture, of a word that finds no space in planning councils, of a memory no longer considered a source of knowledge. This article sought to challenge that silence by approaching aging as political presence, as situated urban experience, and as an act of everyday resistance.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy, we proposed thinking urban space not merely as physical structure, but as a stage of existential visibility. The right to appear – to be seen, heard, and recognized – is the foundation of political action, and its denial, even when unspoken, is a gesture of exclusion. Cities designed according to the rhythms of efficiency and productivity become devices that erase subjectivities misaligned with these values – especially those of old age.

By expanding the notion of mobility and accessibility, we proposed an approach that goes beyond technique. Walking, waiting, sitting, crossing: each gesture of the older adult is, in fact, a way of affirming oneself in space, of saying “I am still here.” In the current urban context, these gestures become acts of ethical resistance. A bench kept in a square, a ramp that respects the body, a traffic-light interval that acknowledges slowness – all these compose a politics of presence.

We thus advocate for an urbanism of listening: a way of conceiving and organizing the city that departs not from the idealization of the productive subject, but from the concrete plurality of bodies that inhabit it. This entails not only accessible infrastructure, but also public listening devices, intergenerational decision--making processes, and an ethics of care that recognizes old age as a necessary time for the city.

We also proposed understanding old age as urban potential – not as nostalgia for the past, but as the capacity to see what haste conceals, to remember what has been forgotten, to remain where everything flows. This presence is not noise; it is a form of spatial wisdom. Old age teaches the city how to endure.

The contribution of this work is therefore twofold: theoretical, in articulating Arendt, urban mobility, and aging in the Global South; and political, in indicating that just cities are not merely those that transport bodies, but those that welcome them with time, space, and listening. As an ethical horizon, we argue that every city should be designed from the most fragile body – because it is this body that reveals whether the world remains shareable.

We carried out a brief analysis of São Paulo in light of the arguments presented and conclude that the city echoes the profound structural exclusion experienced across Latin American cities. An applied ethnography focused on older adults and their narratives could provide counterpoints to the logics that shape the urban fabric for millions of people aging in places that no longer recognize them. By transforming these accounts into language, we would grant them the political status of narrative, as Arendt (2007) proposes: that which only becomes real when shared in public space.

For future research, we also recommend expanding this perspective to themes such as intersectional aging (race, gender, disability), the impacts of the climate crisis on urban older adults, and innovative experiences of participatory urbanism with older adults as protagonists.

Perhaps the greatest challenge is enabling the city, as it ages alongside its inhabitants, to learn how to remember, care, and listen. Only then will urban space cease to be an obstacle and once again become a world.

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• Data availability statement:
  All data supporting the findings of this study are included within the article.

• Editors:
  Lucia Bógus
  Luiz César de Queiroz Ribeiro

• Organizers of this issue:
  Ana Marcela Ardila Pinto
  Carlos Fernando Ferreira Lobo
  Natália Villamizar Duarte

Data availability

All data supporting the findings of this study are included within the article.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  22 June 2026
• Date of issue
  May-Aug 2026

History

• Received
  30 June 2025
• Accepted
  28 Oct 2025