Our relationship with younger and older generations in our lives can facilitate our need for personal care, material security as well as our search for identity and belonging. Biggs [2007] describes how understanding relationships between generationslies at the heart of society’s contemporary dilemmas yet in the social sciences, it remains to be a relatively under explored lens to understanding processes of change [Biggs, 2007, p. 695]. The following research gathered existing literature that discusses intergenerational relations in the domains of a) Sociology and b) Social Gerontology. The sociological tradition discusses processes of social change or how significant historical events shape the environment we age in while the Social Gerontological tradition examines social structures that organize activities across the life course.

Using Suhair Inayatullah’s Causal Layered Analysis as a framework, the following research deconstructed a projected trend of rising demographic dependency in Canada to understand its systemic causes, world views and metaphors. The “assembly line of aging” is revealed as a metaphor that describes a rigid system of age specialization, based on the standardization of activities across the life course. However, as changes in demography, lifestyle and lifespan continue to transform, the assembly line of aging is argued to be too rigid to adapt to the needs of future generations. The “meandering river” is introduced as an alternative metaphor that has the potential to work with and balance a rigid system through recognizing age heterogeneity and challenging conventional age specializations. In order to so, enablers and key stakeholders are highlighted to address the issue more systemically by representing opportunities for agency and action at the individual, community, organizational, and policy level. Finally, this project suggests that a) celebrating age diversity, b) nurturing intergenerational empathy and c) collaborating towards sustainable futures have the potential to enable futures of intergenerational knowledge creation.