Aged Living Urbanism: How to approach aged living urbanistically?

Abstract

New Zealand aged care is heading towards housing more elderly in specially designed housing such as retirement villages. However, in most cases, aged housing fails to connect residents with the wider neighbourhood, instead promoting aged-segregation and perpetuating negative connotations.

There is little consideration by designers in regards to aged living. There has been attention overseas to alternative architectural models and relationships to wider city, where aged living is perceived more urbanisitically. While, locally the are approached more individually, with less regard for context. They tend to be internally focused and attention is paid to evoking a resort lifestyle. Retirement villages are often inserted in residential areas, failing to fit into the context and creating tension between the existing community.

The chosen site is in Petone, where a retirement village is currently being constructed providing a relevant reference point for design. The site is next to the Te Mome stream, Hutt River with little interaction between the landscape, golf course and state housing cut off from each other and the community. The development is following typical design approach and becoming an internalised development which will segregate itself from the community. The thesis project plans to move beyond the proposed development parcel into council owned land. This will widen the potential of the project by cross-leveraging the state housing, golf club, local and regional councils needs to seek a connected development.

Ideally, the project will maximise the potential of the development for the aged population, local residents and community stakeholders. Enlarging from the self-enclosed area to spread across the study area, entwined with it and creating more potential for design. The analysis of the wider realm, to discover aspects of the wider world that may be drawn into this problem and allowing greater degrees of freedom for the problem, urbanism and landscape. The infrastructure of the site provided a technical input into the design. The architectural key preoccupations investigated were the inability of local design to integrate into the context of the area, promoting aged segregation.

Identifying and examining past attempts and types of attempts to treat aged living as an urbanistic problem. To learn from the past practice and how they indicate design approaches which influences the investigation, as it highlighted negative and positive tendencies that are typically done.