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Gardens play a vital role in homemaking for many older people living in aged-care facilities. A garden is where residents can assert ownership, agency, and recall significant memories, especially after relocation in later life. This research addresses a gap in literature about aged-care gardens by expanding notions of therapeutic benefits. It adopts a phenomenological framework and applies unstructured interviews, Go-Along videorecording and digital storytelling for data collection. Findings suggest residents are not merely passive users of gardens, they are active creators, shaping their outdoor environment through gardening and creating meanings in their local landscape that contribute to their experience of being ‘home’.

Real estate markets in Chinese cities are in transition. Advertising for new developments in these markets often reflects changing city aspirations and branding rather than environmental and social experience. This paper investigates real estate marketing as a site of potential ethical transformation of values related to new urban development. It uses Kenneth Burke’s rhetorical analysis as an approach to coding real estate representations from in-flight magazine advertisements as a means of capturing environmental and social viewpoints in China during 2008–2009. Both Chinese and foreign participants coded representations into four code modalities. These were based on anthropocentric – non-anthropocentric environmental orientations and nationalistic – universal social orientations. The results suggested that new developments in China are more likely to be understood as based on environmental resource use for continued national economic expansion rather than for a more sustainable world. Emerging patterns in coded representations have opened up the possibility of greater social choices that were however difficult to unambiguously decode from Chinese real estate advertising. From this it is concluded that it may take some time before real estate demand shifts in response to representations of Chinese eco-cities being promoted by Chinese policy makers in the 2000s.